It is deep night. I have trimmed my lamp, taken a turn across the room, and am again seated at my pleasing toil. The Anthology lies open before me—a brown, German page, rough, but scholarlike. I have pondered each word and phrase, till they all bear a distinct and tangible significance. I have been striving to draw forth the beauty that lies locked in the cold, dead arms of an unspoken language. It requires a mightier magician, and a more prevailing charm. Lines, that are instinct with holy feeling, I have turned and labored with fruitless minuteness. I can transcribe the form—but the life—where is it? My spirit weepeth over its own stupidity. Yet not utterly am I in fault. I am a modern, and an American, and almost—but not quite—a Yankee. I have breathed a dollar-and-cent atmosphere. There is no soul—no enthusiasm in the land. Utility—cold, base utility is the all-in-all. Money is the shibboleth of rank and influence.
O cives, cives, quærenda pecunia primum.
Every thing is reduced to a standard of rationality, as if it were not the most irrational thing that ever sickened a liberal eye, to bind down passion, and poetry, and the “life of life,” by the frigid rules of mathematical exactness. It is my solemn belief, that within fifty years a double-track rail-road will run through the very vale of Tempe, and a steam-engine be propelled by the waters of Arethusa. Improvement! By the little toe of the Great Mogul, may the wheels of such improvement “long tarry in their coming!” Reader, I will not fret. My profit therefrom would be about as much as thy pleasure. But thou knowest not the feelings with which I uncork a bottle of pure Samian wine; and, in transferring it into an American jug, behold its strength and fragrance evaporate—the body swelling with dropsical inflation, while the spirit is oozing away through each treacherous pore. Sed satis. “Quid me querelis exanimas tuis?”
Behold! an enigmatic squib from Euclid, the geometer—him, whose labors I was wont to burden with “the mountain of my curse.” He was, probably, the first to solemnize a marriage so unnatural as that of Geometry and Poetry—January and May.
An ass and mule were bearing wine one day:
Hard on the ass the vinous burden lay;
When thus the mule her fainting dam addressed—
“Why, like a maiden’s, pants thy groaning breast?
Should’st thou give me one portion of thy share,
Then I should double of thy burden bear.