Page:Early Spring in Massachusetts (1881).djvu/28

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14
EARLY SPRING IN MASSACHUSETTS.

are listless. We may be diverted from an amusement, and amused by a diversion. It often happens that a diversion becomes our amusement, and an amusement our employment.

February 27, 1851. Of two men, one of whom knows nothing about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows nothing, and the other really knows something about it, but thinks that he knows all, what great advantage has the latter over the former? which is the better to deal with? I do not know that knowledge amounts to anything more definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the insufficiency of all we had called knowledge before, an indefinite sense of the grandeur and glory of the universe. It is a lighting up of the mist by the sun. But man cannot be said to know, in the highest sense, any better than he can look serenely and with impunity in the face of the sun.

How when a man purchases a thing, he is determined to get and get hold of it, using how many expletives and how long a string of synonymous or similar terms signifying possession in the legal process. What's mine's my own. An old deed of a small piece of swamp land which I have lately surveyed at the risk of being mired past recovery, says that "the said