This quasi omnipresence supplies the imbecility of our condition. In
one of those celestial days, when heaven and earth meet and adorn each
other, it seems a poverty that we can only spend it once; we wish for
a thousand heads, a thousand bodies, that we might celebrate its immense
beauty in many ways and places. Is this fancy? Well, in good faith,
we are multiplied by our proxies. How easily we adopt their labors!
Every ship that comes to America got its chart from Columbus. Every
novel is debtor to Homer. Every carpenter who shaves with a foreplane
borrows the genius of a forgotten inventor. Life is girt all around
with a zodiac of sciences, the contributions of men who have perished
to add their point of light to our sky. Engineer, broker, jurist,
physician, moralist, theologian, and every man, inasmuch as he has any
science, is a definer and map-maker of the latitudes and longitudes
of our condition. These road-makers on every hand enrich us. We must
extend the area of life, and multiply our relations. We are as much
gainers by finding a new property in the old earth, as by acquiring
a new planet.
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