JOSIAH AND SARAH WEDGWOOD
Admitting my inexperience, I must say that I think the instinct for beauty and all the desire to produce beautiful things, which you and Goethe refer to as the "Art Impulse," is a kind of sex quality, not unlike the song of birds or their beautiful plumage.
—Josiah Wedgwood to Doctor Erasmus Darwin
JOSIAH WEDGWOOD
Once upon a day a financial panic was on in Boston. Real estate was rapidly changing hands, most all owners making desperate efforts to realize. Banks which were thought to be solvent and solid went soaring skyward, and even collapsed occasionally, with a loud, ominous, R. G. Dun report. And so it happened that about this time Henry Thoreau strolled out of his cabin and looking up at the placid moon, murmured, "Moonshine, after all, is the only really permanent thing we possess."
This is the first in the series of twelve love-stories—or "tales of moonshine," to use the phrase of Thomas Carlyle.