Draws lengthening shadows from the broken flanks;
And from the column’s head a viewless chief is calling:
“Guide right—close up the ranks.”
Some of his papers for the Chitchat Club could not easily be matched by selections from the magazines and reviews, and if a collection were made of the pieces that he loved to put out in that wasteful way we should have a volume of notable reading, distinguished for a sharply accented individuality of thought and style.
For a number of years before his death Rearden was engaged in constructing (the word writing here is inadequate) a work on Sappho, which, as I understand the matter, was to be a kind of compendium of all the little that is known and pretty nearly all the much that has been conjectured and said of her. It was to be profusely illustrated by master-hands, copiously annotated and enriched with variorum readings—a book for bookworms. Of its fate I am not advised, but trust that none of this labor of love may be lost. A work which for many years engaged the hand and the heart of such a man can not, of whatever else it may be devoid, lack that distinction which is to literature what it is to character—its life, its glory and its crown.
1892.
THE PASSING OF THE HORSE
CERTAIN admirers of the useful, beautiful, dangerous and senseless beast known to many of them as the “hoss” are promising the creature a life of elegant leisure, with opportunities for mental culture which he has not heretofore enjoyed. Universal use of the automobile in all its actual and possible forms and for all practical purposes in the world’s work and pleasure is to relieve the horse from his onerous service and give him a life of ease “and a perpetual feast of nectared sweets.”
The horse of the future is to do no work, have no cares, be immune to the whip, the saddle, the harness and the unwelcome attentions of the farrier. He is to toil not, neither spin, yet Nebuchadnezzar in all his glory was not stabled and pastured as he is to be. In brief, the automobile is going to make of this bad world a horse elysium, where the tired brute can repose on beds of amaranth and moly, to the eminent satisfaction of his body and his mind.