Page:The Atlantic Monthly Volume 2.djvu/502

494 somnambulic state read with the tops of their heads?

Besides, I once had the telegraph alphabet explained to me by one of the wire-operators,—though I have forgotten it,—and it is possible, that, in my semi-mesmeric condition, the recollection revived, so that I knew that such and such pulsations of the wire stood for such and such letters.

But is there not a certain spiritual significance, also, in these singular experiences here related?

We may safely lay down this doctrine,—a very old and much-thumbed doctrine, but none the less true for all its dog-ears:—No man lives for himself alone. He is related not only to the silent stars and the singing-birds and the sunny landscape, but to every other human soul. You say, This should not be stated so sermonically, but symbolically. That is just what I have been doing in my narrative of the wires.

It gives one a great idea of human communion,—this power of sending these spark-messages thousands of miles in a second. Far more poetical, too,—is it not?—as well as more practical, than tying billets under the wings of carrier-pigeons. It is removing so much time and space out of the way,—those absorbents of spirits,—and bringing mind into close contact with mind. But when one can read these messages without the aid of machinery, by merely touching the wires, how much greater does the symbol become!

All mankind are one. As some philosophers express it,—one great mind includes us all. But then, as it would never do for all minds to be literally one, any more than it would for all magnetisms to be identical in their modes of manifestation, or for all the rivers, creeks, and canals to flow together, so we have our natural barriers and channels, our propriums, as the Swedish seer has it,—and so we live and let live. We feel with others and think with others, but with strict reservations. That evening among the wires, for instance, brought me into wonderful intimate contact with a few of the joys and sorrows of some of my fellow-beings; but an excess of such experiences would interfere with our freedom and our happiness. It is our self-hood, properly balanced, which constitutes our dignity, our humanity. A certain degree, and a very considerable degree of insulation is necessary, that individual life and mental equanimity may go on.

But there may be a degree of insulation which is unbecoming a member of the human family. It may become brutish,—or it may amount to the ridiculous. In Paris, there was an old lady, of uncertain age, who lived in the apartment beneath mine. I think I never saw her but twice. She manifested her existence sometimes by complaining of the romping of the children overhead, who called her the "bonne femme." Why they gave her the name I don't know; for she seemed to have no human ties in the world, and wasted her affections on a private menagerie of parrots, canaries, and poodle-dogs. A few shocks of the electric telegraph might have raised her out of her desert island, and given her some glimpses of the great continents of human love and sympathy.

A man who lives for himself alone sits on a sort of insulated glass stool, with a noli-me-tangere look at his fellow-men, and a shivering dread of some electric shock from contact with them. He is a non-conductor in relation to the great magnetic currents which run pulsing along the invisible wires that connect one heart with another. Preachers, philanthropists, and moralists are in the habit of saying of such a person,—"How cold! how selfish! how unchristian!" I sometimes fancy a citizen of the planet Venus, that social star of evening and morning, might say,—"How absurd!" What a figure he cuts there, sitting in solitary state upon his glass tripod,—in the middle of a crowd of excited fellow-beings, hurried to and fro by their passions and sympathies,—like an awkward country-bumpkin caught in the midst of