Without me where is your “zoo” with its panthers and leopards with dolphin and crocodile and hippopotamus, with lynxes and hyenas, with ostrich and pelican, with buffalo and dromedary, with ichneumons and scorpions, with the gigantic elephant and its proboscis and the pygmy squirrel! Oh, what of my chimerical and utopian “zoo,” with the phenix and dragon and griffins and chameleons and gorgons and gnomes and basilisks and sphinxes and hybrids!
But I am not archaic; the scope of my dynamic energy is practical and not eccentric. Mine are politics, the diadems of monarchs, the scepters of tyrants, barbarous anarchy and despotic autocracy, the panics of demagogue and the parliaments of autonomy and democracy. Chemistry and chemical analysis, physics with phenomena of electricity, acoustics, and optics, mechanics, botany, geology, entomology, and all the “ologies” with their technical glossaries; they are mine.
So are all the apothecaries and pharmacies with glycerine and licorice and creosote and the antidotes for quinsy; for catarrh, dropsy, neuralgia, and for every “-itis” and “-osis”; emetics for the stomach; the cathartics, calomel and castor-oil; doses of paregoric for colic; plasters for imposthumes; arsenic for spasms of epilepsy, and tonics for anemic arteries; a peptonoic diet for dysentery; oxygen against bronchial phlegm; bromides for asthma; iodine for pleurisy and parasites; narcotics to calm hysteria; antipyrin for agonizing rheumatism; antitoxins for diphtheria and for the deleterious microbes of cholera or typhoid, and bottles of panaceas.
Anatomy is mine and the surgeon, diagnosing symptoms, charting septic organs on the diagrams, trepanning the cranium, cauterizing for hemorrhage, is mine; so are his sponges and syringes and silk and his styptics, and his prophylactic hygiene, and his anæsthetics, chloroform and ether, and his antiseptics against bacteria and gangrene, and his autopsy and his skeletons.
The school is mine with its desks, its programs and schedule and the scholars, from their alphabet to their diploma, their arithmetic and geometry, their gymnasiums and athletics, and the school diamond and amphitheater. Pause before you ostracize me from my schools.
Would you be an essayist, sketching graphic stories or typical characters; an historian, cataloging the treasures of archives, and chronicling epochs of catastrophe and calm; or a philosopher, systematizing theories of Stoics, Hedonists, Peripatetics and Scholastics; or a poet, composing idylls and madrigals, lyrics and odes with strophes and the epics with episodes, you are mine. Without me you have not talents or ideas or paper or ink. Mine are your grammar and syntax, your syllables, your paragraphs with their commas and colons and parentheses, your lexicons and encyclopedias and card-catalogs, your topics and themes for ecstatic rhapsodies or for austere logic, your fantastic paradoxes and your idiotic theories. ’Tis I who phrase for you your axioms, caustic criticisms, laconic epigrams, all your irony and sardonic sarcasm. If your technique is idiomatic, your methods puzzling or crystal, your tropes are metaphors graphic, your fancies hectic or anæmic, you are mine. I am your enthusiastic stenographer, jotting down and synopsizing your ideas and typing them to be stereotyped in your authentic tomes, whether anonymous or under a pseudonym.
I apologize for my tautologies, for this monotonous labyrinth, for the phalanx of technicalities and for the etymological mosaic which strangles your larynx with “ics” and “isms.” Whether it is all abysmal bathos, or the climax and acme of the practical, I am to blame for it.
But pause before you ostracize me from my schools; pause ere the nemesis of chaos and disaster is yours; but if you are to be characterized as adamant and without sympathy, let the poets echo a threnody about my coffin; let there be a chorus of pæans under the cypress and cedar, the larch and osier, the myrtle and amaranth, about my cenotaph; let there be in my cemetery a mausoleum with a monolith, and on it my epitaph:
The Lexicons of Europe Are the Trophies of Greece.