There is a little design of Blake's in _The Gates of Paradise_, which represents a man standing on the earth who leans a ladder against the moon and prepares to mount; the motto underneath being: "I want! I want!" This is a type of our own age. Never was such an age of discontent, never such a Babel of voices crying: "I want! I want!" We have become very conscious of our pain, and are not ashamed to cry out and proclaim it on the house-tops in these hysterical times--simply because the ancient sanctions and anodynes have lost their sanctity and comfort for us. The very "priests in black gowns" who used to "walk their rounds and bind with briers our joys and desires," have been themselves corrupted with a longing for a little present happiness, and that Old Woman in the shoe, Mrs. Grundy herself, instead of whipping us all round and putting us to bed in the old summary fashion, when we venture to complain that the shoe pinches here and there, has herself become lachrymose. We cry out because, having neither the old repressions nor the old opiates to restrain us, there is no valid reason why we should hold our tongues. By crying loud enough and long enough we may get some help. We may even find some good-natured person to stop crying himself and help us; and then for very shame we may go and do likewise. In this lies the age's hope. It is really in its best aspect an unselfish age, an age in which sympathy and justice are vital forces, in which the miseries of others are felt as our own. There are thousands now who feel themselves "as nerves o'er which do creep the else unfelt oppressions of the earth." We are not wise enough yet to conceive and organize those vital adjustments between conflicting wants, interests, and principles, which shall be of deeper efficiency than mere superficial compromises; but this wisdom will come in due time, if we do not rush into anarchy through that licentious impatience which is the curse of revolutionary periods.