University of Virginia Library

INDIVIDUALITY.

“I love to stand at the street corners,” said Dr.
Spooner, as he was standing, with his cane behind him,
on which he was leaning, looking up and down the
street. “Did the fact never occur to you,” continued he,
“that every one of those persons moving before you was
an individuality, an atomic component in the great aggregated
humanity, and yet an isolation, a microcosmatic
existence in a world of existences?” He looked at us a
moment, as if expecting an answer. Overwhelmed by
the profundity of the question, we remained silent.
“Yes,” continued he, lifting himself up by his cane,
“each individual is an individual world. All the love,

hope, ambition, hatred, and devotion, revealed in the
grand macrocosm before us — the world — is enacted in
each little globe that moves by us, — forming the microcosm
— the individual. It is a grand study, sir. Man,
abstractly considered, is a broad sweep of the human
horizon with the glass of truth; individually considered,
the telescope is reversed, — revealing man infinitely
less, but still the same. I have stood here, by the hour,
reading the faces that have moved by me as the planets
move round the sun, presenting varied phases, — one little
world presenting the mirthful phase, another the sad,
another the anxious, another the fierce, — but how distinct
and beautiful the individuality! At such times I
think of the music of the lines describing the `solemn
silence' with which the planets revolve,
These sing to me in their distinctness and silence, and”
— A boy passing at the time touched the Doctor's cane,
and, it being just when he was drawing himself up to
give emphasis to his sentence, he fell backward, with
considerable violence. He smiled as he gathered himself
up. “Human weakness,” said he, “may fall, but
eternal truth must stand.”