Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1864, by Ticknor andFields, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District ofMassachusetts.
Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes movedto the end of the article. Table of contents has been generated for the HTML version.
THE CADMEAN MADNESS.
THE BRIDGE OF CLOUD.
THE ELECTRIC GIRL OF LA PERRIÈRE.
LITERARY LIFE IN PARIS.
THE MASKERS.
CULLET.
WHAT WILL BECOME OF THEM?
FORGOTTEN.
WET-WEATHER WORK.
REGULAR AND VOLUNTEER OFFICERS.
THE TOTAL DEPRAVITY OF INANIMATE THINGS.
WHAT SHALL WE HAVE FOR DINNER?
BEFORE VICKSBURG.
OUR VISIT TO RICHMOND.
REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
RECENT AMERICAN PUBLICATIONS
An old English divine fancied that all the world might go mad and nobodyknow it. The conception suggests a query whether the standard of sanity,as of fashions and prices, be not a purely artificial one, an accidentof convention, a law of society, an arbitrary institute, and therefore apossible mistake. A sage and a maniac each thinks the other mad. Thedecision is a matter of majorities. Should a whole community becomeinsane, it would nevertheless vote itself wise; if the craze of Bedlamwere uniform, its inmates could not distinguish it from a Pantheon; andthough all human history seemed to the gods only as a continuous seriesof mediæval processions des sots et des ânes, yet the topsy-turvyintellect of the world would ever worship folly in the name of wisdom.Arts and sciences, ideas and institutions, laws and learning would stillabound, transmogrified to suit the reigning madness. And as statisticsreveal the late gradual and general increase of insanity, it becomes aprovident people to consider what may be the ultimate results, if thisincrease should happen never to be checked. And if sanity be, indeed, aglory which we might all lose unawares, we may well betake ourselves tovery solemn reflection as to whether we are, at the present moment, inour wits and senses, or not.
The peculiar proficiencies of great epochs are as astonishing as theexploits of individual frenzy. The era of the Greek rhapsodists, when abody of matchless epical literature was handed down by memory fromgeneration to generation, and a recitation of the whole "Odyssey" wasnot too much for a dinner-party,—the era of Periclean culture, when theAthenian populace was