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    think and feel , love and hate , suffer and enjoy , live , die , and pass into eternity ? Why , these are they for whom the greatest of mankind exist , —to whom earth's master-spirits are but ministering spirits , sent forth to minister by the divinity , which made them

    great by breathing into their souls some portion of its own intelligence and love . It is but the emptiness ^ that is gone ; the fullness remains . True , they remain involuntarily : with their good will , some tens of thousands of them would ramble too . They are

    ' in the populous city pent / They are chained to the oar , which they must pull unceasingly ; they are serfs affixed to the soil . And what are we all ? The difference is only that of a shorter or a longer tether ; and the most excursive most feel that they are closely tied . It is not true that ' we drag at each remove a lengthening chain ; ' it pulls continually ; and if we go from Italy to Greece " , and from Greece to Egypt , it is but that we stretch

    another link or two beyond what others may . We can soon go round the world ; and then there is nothing left for it , but to go round the world again , and again , till we are tired . What is the earth itself , to a wandering mind ? It is but as a little larger London ; having , it is true , many noble piles and deep dells , and winding and variegated roads ; but they are bounded all ; and if the operative cannot domesticate at Scarborough , and sojourn in Rome , and reach Constantinople , neither can the wealthiest poet refresh

    his wandering spirit beneath the mountains of the moon , nor run the round of Saturn ' s ring , nor inhale the brightness of Arcturus , nor deftly guide his bark between the Pleiades that cluster in a bluer ocean , and are fairer than the isles of Greece . It is but a poor and pitiful little farm on which we are the serfs , beyond whose close hedge-rows we may not wander , and where we can form but dim notions of the kingdoms which we know are beyond , with all their pomp and glory . Not even a Satan comes to take us up aloft , and give us a tempting sight of those vast and

    splendid regions ; though in dark days of superstition there were men with such a burning thirst of knowledge , such an intolerance of the narrow circumscription of their horizon , that , for one such glance , they would willingly have sold him their immortal souls .

    Begone , then , as far as ye may , ye vagrant few ; I will remain with the many who must not move at all , —knowing that your utmost scope is but that of a somewhat larger cage , whose very size only makes you the more beat against the bars , until I we ' all come alike to the common chorus of the starling— cant get

    out , I can't get out . ' There is no place like London for conveying the abstract notion of the people from the understanding to the imagination , and even to the senses . We may there see that power , which patriots have worshipped , to which they have devoted themselves , and for which they have died , in its invisibility . He who has never seen a multitude , knows nothing of the sublime .

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    Autumn in London . £ 61

• Citation
  • Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), Oct. 2, 1832, page 661, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1822/page/13/