Consequently, there never was such a collection of crude pippins and half-grown windfalls as our native literature displays among its fruits.There are literary green-groceries at every corner, which will buy anything, from a button-pear to a pine-apple.It takes a long apprenticeship to train a whole people to reading and writing.The temptation of money and fame is too great for young people.Do I not remember that glorious moment when the late Mr.-we won't say who, - editor of the - we won't say what, offered me the sum of fifty cents PER double-columned quarto page for shaking my young boughs over his foolscap apron? Was it not an intoxicating vision of gold and glory? I should doubtless have revelled in its wealth and splendor, but for learning that the FIFTY CENTS was to be considered a rhetorical embellishment, and by no means a literal expression of past fact or present intention.
- Beware of making your moral staple consist of the negative virtues.It is good to abstain, and teach others to abstain, from all that is sinful or hurtful.But making a business of it leads to emaciation of character, unless one feeds largely also on the more nutritious diet of active sympathetic benevolence.
- I don't believe one word of what you are saying, - spoke up the angular female in black bombazine.
I am sorry you disbelieve it, Madam, - I said, and added softly to my next neighbor, - but you prove it.
The young fellow sitting near me winked; and the divinity-student said, in an undertone, - OPTIME DICTUM.
Your talking Latin, - said I, - reminds me of an odd trick of one of my old tutors.He read so much of that language, that his English half turned into it.He got caught in town, one hot summer, in pretty close quarters, and wrote, or began to write, a series of city pastorals.Eclogues he called them, and meant to have published them by subscription.I remember some of his verses, if you want to hear them.- You, Sir, (addressing myself to the divinity-student,) and all such as have been through college, or, what is the same thing, received an honorary degree, will understand them without a dictionary.The old man had a great deal to say about "aestivation," as he called it, in opposition, as one might say, to HIBERNATION.Intramural aestivation, or town-life in summer, he would say, is a peculiar form of suspended existence, or semi-asphyxia.One wakes up from it about the beginning of the last week in September.This is what I remember of his poem:-AESTIVATION.
AN UNPUBLISHED POEM, BY MY LATE LATIN TUTORIN candent ire the solar splendor flames;The foles, languescent, pend from arid rames;His humid front the cive, anheling, wipes, And dreams of erring on ventiferous ripes.
How dulce to vive occult to mortal eyes, Dorm on the herb with none to supervise, Carp the suave berries from the crescent vine, And bibe the flow from longicaudate kine!
To me, alas! no verdurous visions come, Save yon exiguous pool's conferva-scum, -No concave vast repeats the tender hue That laves my milk-jug with celestial blue!
Me wretched! Let me curr to quercine shades Effund your albid hausts, lactiferous maids!
Oh, might I vole to some umbrageous clump, -Depart, - be off, - excede, - evade, - erump!
- I have lived by the sea-shore and by the mountains.- No, I am not going to say which is best.The one where your place is is the best for you.But this difference there is: you can domesticate mountains, but the sea is FERAE NATURAE.You may have a hut, or know the owner of one, on the mountain-side; you see a light half-way up its ascent in the evening, and you know there is a home, and you might share it.You have noted certain trees, perhaps; you know the particular zone where the hemlocks look so black in October, when the maples and beeches have faded.All its reliefs and intaglios have electrotyped themselves in the medallions that hang round the walls of your memory's chamber.- The sea remembers nothing.It is feline.It licks your feet, - its huge flanks purr very pleasantly for you; but it will crack your bones and eat you, for all that, and wipe the crimsoned foam from its jaws as if nothing had happened.The mountains give their lost children berries and water; the sea mocks their thirst and lets them die.
The mountains have a grand, stupid, lovable tranquillity; the sea has a fascinating, treacherous intelligence.The mountains lie about like huge ruminants, their broad backs awful to look upon, but safe to handle.The sea smooths its silver scales until you cannot see their joints, - but their shining is that of a snake's belly, after all.- In deeper suggestiveness I find as great a difference.The mountains dwarf mankind and foreshorten the procession of its long generations.The sea drowns out humanity and time; it has no sympathy with either; for it belongs to eternity, and of that it sings its monotonous song forever and ever.
Yet I should love to have a little box by the seashore.I should love to gaze out on the wild feline element from a front window of my own, just as I should love to look on a caged panther, and see it, stretch its shining length, and then curl over and lap its smooth sides, and by-and-by begin to lash itself into rage and show its white teeth and spring at its bars, and howl the cry of its mad, but, to me, harmless fury.- And then, - to look at it with that inward eye, - who does not love to shuffle off time and its concerns, at intervals, - to forget who is President and who is Governor, what race he belongs to, what language he speaks, which golden-headed nail of the firmament his particular planetary system is hung upon, and listen to the great liquid metronome as it beats its solemn measure, steadily swinging when the solo or duet of human life began, and to swing just as steadily after the human chorus has died out and man is a fossil on its shores?
