The traveller from the Old World to the New is apt to lose himself in reflection when he should be observing. Speculations come in crowds in the wilderness. He finds himself philosophizing with every step he takes, as luxuriously as by his study fireside, or in his rare solitary walk at home.

In England, everything comes complete and finished under notice. Each man may be aware of some one process of formation, which it is his business to conduct; but all else is presented to him in its entireness. The statesman knows what it is to compose an act of parliament; to proceed from the first perception of the want of it, through the gathering together of facts and opinions, the selection from these, the elaborating, adjusting, moulding, specifying, excluding, consolidating, till it becomes an entire something, which he throws down for parliament to find fault with. When it is passed, the rest of society looks upon it as a whole, as a child does upon a table or a doll, without being aware of any process of formation. The shoemaker, thus, takes his loaf of bread, and the clock that ticks behind his door, as if they came down from the clouds as they are, in return for so much of his wages; and he analyzes nothing but shoes.