In truth, it was dizzy work, amid such fermentation of opinions as
was going on in the general brain of the Community. It was a kind of
Bedlam, for the time being, although out of the very thoughts that
were wildest and most destructive might grow a wisdom, holy, calm,
and pure, and that should incarnate itself with the substance of a
noble and happy life. But, as matters now were, I felt myself (and,
having a decided tendency towards the actual, I never liked to feel
it) getting quite out of my reckoning, with regard to the existing
state of the world. I was beginning to lose the sense of what kind
of a world it was, among innumerable schemes of what it might or
ought to be. It was impossible, situated as we were, not to imbibe
the idea that everything in nature and human existence was fluid, or
fast becoming so; that the crust of the earth in many places was
broken, and its whole surface portentously upheaving; that it was a
day of crisis, and that we ourselves were in the critical vortex.
Our great globe floated in the atmosphere of infinite space like an
unsubstantial bubble. No sagacious man will long retain his sagacity,
if he live exclusively among reformers and progressive people,
without periodically returning into the settled system of things, to
correct himself by a new observation from that old standpoint.
It was now time for me, therefore, to go and hold a little talk with
the conservatives, the writers of "The North American Review," the
merchants, the politicians, the Cambridge men, and all those
respectable old blockheads who still, in this intangibility and
mistiness of affairs, kept a death-grip on one or two ideas which had
not come into vogue since yesterday morning.
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