It is wonderful
that this gets done, when some admirable deeds which I could
mention do not get done. Our particular lives seem of such
fortune and confident strength and durability as piers of solid
rock thrown forward into the tide of circumstance. When every
other path would fail, with singular and unerring confidence we
advance on our particular course. What risks we run! famine and
fire and pestilence, and the thousand forms of a cruel fate,--and
yet every man lives till he--dies. How did he manage that? Is
there no immediate danger? We wonder superfluously when we hear
of a somnambulist walking a plank securely,--we have walked a
plank all our lives up to this particular string-piece where we
are. My life will wait for nobody, but is being matured still
without delay, while I go about the streets, and chaffer with
this man and that to secure it a living. It is as indifferent
and easy meanwhile as a poor man's dog, and making acquaintance
with its kind. It will cut its own channel like a mountain
stream, and by the longest ridge is not kept from the sea at
last.
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