I know it is an old saw, but it is so freshened by the modern instance of steamers every week, that it has become quotable once more; and I have almost a mind to go on with the chorus, and show that Sophocles may be fairly rendered in favour of railways and iron-steeds. But the telegraph, Basil! I must even quote a bit of English for that. As gentle Cowper saith:-- "The tempest itself lags behind, And the swift-wing'd arrows of light!" The wires are already stretched from Massachusetts, and almost from Halifax to the Gulf of Mexico. A spark here, and the lettered bulletin is reeling off in Louisiana! The fresh news will, hereafter, be hawked in the streets of Boston and along the wharves of New Orleans in the same hour. It will soon be sent farther still; and a British fleet in the Pacific may be served with orders from the Admiralty Board, not two weeks old. We are fairly in hand-shaking neighbourhood. I remember when European intelligence came to us rather as history than as news. It is not so now. While emotion is yet warm with you, it sets our own hearts throbbing. We, too, are, in the present tense, with Europe; for the revolutions of peace have been more wonderful than those of warfare. They have reunited what strife had sundered, and rendered England and America again one family. Talking of revolutions,--how hot the noon of the century is growing! You will allow, dear Basil, that we in America, are well situated to be lookers on. With all the security of distance, we have the advantages of nearness. You are on the stage--we are in the boxes. You go behind the scenes, and see the wire-working and machinery, but we get the effect of the spectacle. The great revolutionary drama is before us, and we can behold it calmly; interested, but not involved. For a devout or philosophical spectator, America is the true observatory. Here we can watch "the great Babel, and not feel the crowd." It is our own fault if, with such advantages, we do not anticipate the judgment of future ages, and arrive instinctively at conclusions which those who share the tumult itself must ordinarily learn in the soberness of after-thoughts, or, perhaps, by a dear experience.