——'Sweet nights,
When Isis, the pure star of lovers, lights
Her bridal crescent o'er the holy stream!'
All who have been in love, feel that the soft influence which comes down from the face of Isis is feminine in its witchery. She is friendly to love affairs, although Miss Diana, when in Greece, would have nothing to do with the masculine deities; and although she banished Calisto, and transformed Acteon, yet did these same Greeks scandalize the virgin, by reporting that she forgot her fastidiousness when she was smitten by the charms of an Endymion on the Carian Mount. To return. We are glad that the poets of the olden time sexed the stars pretty much as their fancies thought proper, and that we Christians still perpetuate these beautiful fictions of their mythologies; for there is a charm in the classical association which now comes upon the mind, when viewing the heavens, that we should regret to part with, however heathenish and anti-utilitarian it may be.
The owners of bright eyes have astronomy enough to recognise Venus, the beautiful star of evening; and yet they perversely and anti-mythologically call her it, when they should know that she is all that is now left of that beautiful being of the cestus, who, like a wreath of foam, was born of a billow near Cythera. Let us be consistent, and call Venus she, even as we call the moon she, and her lord and master, 'the eye of the universe,' he. It is proper to speak of Saturn, and his rings, of Mars, and his belligerent front; and we should, to be consistent, she Pallas, Juno, and Vesta, every one of them. Let us also call this great heap of dirt and water which we tread on, and sail over, and speak of, as our mother earth, feminine. Our wretchedly-abused planet is spoken of as belonging to no sex in particular, now-a-days, although she was once called Terra and Titæa; and then she was a beauty, and a charming one, too, as we should judge from some of her heart-stealing, bright-eyed daughters.
Poetry demands that we still continue to sex the stars. Let us regard Jupiter as a great big lubberly fellow, making love to the shy and bashful Vesta, and waking up jealousy in the bosom of his elder sweet-heart, Juno. Let us have Mars getting up assignations with the all-loving Venus, as of old; and Saturn and Pallas felicitating each other in the manner becoming two heads, the one so full of justice, and the other of wisdom, as are theirs. How delectable it would be, to fancy Madame Earth flirting with the long-yeared Herschel, to the utter astonishment of her neighbor Mercury, who would either have to live an old bachelor, or look up a mistress in some of the systems which revolve in the far-off regions of space!
Our imagination has run riot long enough through the heavens; and we therefore return back to our starting-place, the earth. We were speaking of the incongruity of the sexual designations now in vogue. Why is it, that once introduced, the system of sexing things was not carried out farther? Why not give sex to a tree, a carriage, a wind-mill, and our pantaloons, as well as to a yacht, a watch, and every scrabbling village in the land? We love to think upon the Mississippi as the 'Father of Waters,' and the Ohio as 'La belle Riviere;' for to the masculine strength and stature of the one, we offer our admiration, and to the feminine beauty and grace of the other, we have yielded up our heart.
We were speaking, before we got on this mad-cap digression, of the miseries in which the editorial fraternity in general, and Frank Thornton in particular, were sometimes plunged, by ill-timed demands for that bane of the craft called 'copy.' At such times, Frank would disenchant himself of his fond visions, pick up his pen, arrange his paper, and—think, or try to think, of a subject. He would look over the newspapers for topics; whip up his brain for a suggestion, or look out at the window, and seeing his friend James Summers, who prided himself on being a man of the world, he would conclude to write an article on men of the world in general, much after the manner of the fragment below.
'Fielding says, that in order to understand men, it is necessary that one should be born with a genius for that purpose.' Your men of the world think so too; hence, they are the favorites of nature, and as such, are superior to ordinary mortals, and have a right, in consequence, to look down on inferiority. We are not going to upset Fielding, Bulwer, et id omne genus; we only say, that we detest the boast and swagger which your men of the world take upon themselves as a natural right, peculiar to those who come into the world with an extra eye to read that volume of mysteries, the human heart, locked up, like the ark of old, from the vision of the vulgar.
'Your man of the world is the most bustling of bodies, and looks like Atlas with the globe incumbent on his shoulders. His lips form an oracle of human wisdom, and it is rank profanity to question aught that emanates from so holy a source. His contempt for inferior understandings is most supreme; and his humor, like a foaming cataract, flows and boils with sublime rage, if impertinence dare question his profundity, or contest his right to monopolize the gleams of knowledge which light up the human mind. He is the greatest and most orthodox of bigots, and takes good care that the stultified head of heresy be scathed by the lightnings of his indignation. He uses old saws with a wink; and if he chooses to bless you with a squint, you are unpardonable, if you do not cheer him with a smile. He is a stickler for antiquity, and hates smooth chins and black heads, for their greenness and folly. He is the repository of all the fragments of wisdom that are left of shipwrecked ages, which have floated down on the stream of time. He gathers together the bits and ends of sayings which go to make up the traditionary lore of a country; and this unbooked knowledge renders him sager than a man of much reading. In fine, your man of the world is a very great man, and is to be respected, whether he discourses of the evangelists at a horse-race, or flourishes political eloquence, and that Helicon which inspires it, a beer-mug, in the unquiet recesses of some venerable ale-house.
'This may be called an 'outline in pencil' of a man of the world, when the shadows of fifty years or so are upon him; when he has exhausted the fountains of his wild blood, and turned out sage and philosopher. A man must run a long and labyrinthine gauntlet, under the scourge of the vices, before he can aspire to the character. Of course, it is right that such an one should usurp the throne of wisdom, as his shoulders have been legitimately invested with the purple of sin. The right to rule can only be predicated on a youth of prostitution, a manhood of degradation, and an old age of impenitence.