“Yes,” replied Mr. Gimblett, “I suppose it was very fine; but much beyond my depth. I confess to being one of the sheep who looked up and were not fed.”
“That’s because you haven’t a metaphysical mind,” said Mr. Balloon, regarding his friend with pity; “you have got a certain faculty of mind, but I suspect you have not got the logical grasp requisite for the comprehension of such a sermon as that.”
“I am afraid I have not,” said Mr. Gimblett.
“I tell you what it is,” continued Mr. Balloon, “Mr. German has a head. He’s an intellectual giant, I hardly know whether he is greater as a subjective preacher, or in the luminous objectivity of his argumentum ad hominem. As an instructive reasoner, too, he is perfectly great. With what synthetical power he refuted the Homoiousian theory. I tell you Homoiousianism will be nowhere after that.”
“To tell the truth,” said Mr. Gimblett, “I went to sleep at that long word, and did not awake until he was on Theodicy.”
“Ah, yes,” said Mr. Balloon, “that was a splendid manifestation of ratiocinative word-painting. I was completely carried away when, in his magnificent, sublime, and marrowy style he took an analogical view of the anthropological.” But at this point Mr. Balloon soared away into the air, and left Mr. Gimblett standing with wondering vision as to whither he had gone.
At the time the Atlantic telegraph was first laid a certain preacher thought proper to use it as an illustration of the connection between heaven and earth, thus: “When the sulphuric acid of genuine attrition corrodes the contaminating zinc of innate degeneracy and actual sinfulness, and the fervent electrical force of prayerful eternity ascends up to the residence of the Eternal Supreme One, you may calculate on unfailing and immediate despatch with all magnetical rapidity.”
A certain American altiloquent was once talking of liberty, when he said, “White-robed liberty sits upon her rosy clouds above us; the Genius of our country, standing on her throne of mountains, bids her eagle standard-bearer wind his spiral course full in the sun’s proud eye; while the Genius of Christianity, surrounded by ten thousand cherubim and seraphim, moves the panorama of the milky clouds above us, and floats in immortal fragrance—the very aroma of Eden through all the atmosphere.”
An altiloquent was one day about taking a journey into the country. He was rather of a nervous tendency, having met with two or three accidents in travelling. Before getting into the hired conveyance he asked the driver, “Can you, my friend, conduct this quadruped along the highway without destroying the equilibrium of the vehicle?” The journey having been made without the “equilibrium of the vehicle” being destroyed, when he reached the inn where the horse was to lodge for the night, he said to the ostler, “Boy, extricate this quadruped from the vehicle, stabulate him, devote him an adequate supply of nutritious aliment, and when the aurora of morn shall again illumine the oriental horizon I will reward you with pecuniary compensation for your amiable hospitality.”
On a certain occasion one of this class of talkers was dining in a country farm-house, when, among other vegetables on the table, cabbage was one. After despatching the first supply, he was asked by the hostess if he would take a little more, when he said, “By no means, madam. Gastronomical satiety admonishes me that I have arrived at the ultimate of culinary deglutition consistent with the code of Esculapius.”