The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Various 5 стр.

'I say, Jones,' exclaimed the Major (as he was called) one day as he sat smoothing off a new ramrod for his fowling piece, 'what would you say to a chance of getting that old stick-in-the-mud, Witherpee, on the hip? I rather flatter myself that I can do it.'

'Go ahead, my son,' said Jones, pleasantly, by way of encouragement.

'You own that infernal piece of swamp down by the railroad crossing, don't you? That air's a valuable piece of real estate!'

'Well, yes. It's never been spoilt by too much cultivation that I know of.'

'I reckon I can just get a heap of money for that air; and what's more, I can have the satisfaction of selling it to a gentleman who can appreciate it.'

'It does you credit, Major. That's what I call a genuine love of nature. It ain't every man that sees the beauties of a first-class rural retreat like that,' and the speaker's countenance was radiant with benignitywhether at the high-toned sentiment of his friend, or at the prospect of getting the better of the 'Squire, it was difficult to determine. He thought it well, however, to add: 'But I'd advise you to be mighty careful if you're calc'lating to run a saw on old 'Bijh. What's your programme?'

'You see this here interesting and valuable collection of gold dust,' said the Major, producing a vial which contained particles of the ore in unusual abundance, and flourishing it in his hand in a manner intensely theatrical. 'Belonging to a friend of mine, he donates it for this occasion only, so to speak. It will appear, of course, to have been dug out of a piece of ground belonging to that highly respectable and public spirited citizen, Mr. G. G. Jones. With a cupidity not at all to be wondered at, I shall attempt to keep the matter secret and immediately to make a purchase. I shall apply to Witherpee, as a man of wealth, to advance me part of the funds, or get him, rather, to act as my agent in buying it, because you, Jones, a friend of mine, would suspect me of being up to something if I should offer to buy it myself. D'ye see the bait, now? Catch him playing off!'

As further conversation was modulated to an undertone, and accompanied with a complete signal code of nods and chuckles, it is fair to presume that Mr. J. did see the baitand was sure of a good nibble too.

No time was lost before the speculator and his victim had their knees under the same tablewith a mug of hard cider between them. Mingled suspicion and avarice in Abijah's expression argued well for the success of the scheme. As is often the case, his love of money was only surpassed by the credulity with which he gave ear to new plans for satisfying it. He was slow to trust Davis, because they had not been the best of friends, but the Major played his cards so well that the old fellow did not waver long:

'All you will have to do is to hand it right over to me, you know, and take your commission money. You see just as well as I do that it wouldn't do no how for me to undertake it on my own hook.'

And the 'Squire said, 'Yes, certainly,' but couldn't see it distinctly either, and after they had fixed upon the maximum price, and the 'Squire had feasted his eyes once more on the 'real glitter,' and Charley had explained for the twenty-first time that the divining rod had demonstrated the singular fact that not a bit of ground outside that particular lot was worth a red cent to prospect on, and the 'Squire had once for all swallowed the whole story, and declared it the most remarkable thing he ever heard of, he consented to act as agent in the purchase.

For some unaccountable reason, Abijah Witherpee found Mr. Jones not at all in the humor for a bargain. The land wasn't worth much, he knew, and it was very handsome in the 'Squire to offer fifty dollars for it, but the fact was that his feelings somehow prompted him to keep it: it was a silly idea, perhaps, but he had always thought, ever since he had owned the land, that some day it would be worth gold to him.

'Gracious goodness!' thought Abijah; 'Jones swore that it was a secret that only he and the diviner knew. Could this man have felt it out by animal magnetism, or anything of that sort?' But his mind was at ease again when he was assured by further conversation that the owner was entirely ignorant of the momentous truth. The 'Squire's offers were tempting, and, from byplay and bantering, at last amounted to what appeared a perfectly fabulous sum. The upshot of the matter was that the coolheaded Jones got rid of the wretched little lot for $490 cash. The purchaser was now quite sure that he was the shrewdest fellow in that part of the country.

Just as had been anticipated, the agent's next move was to lay claim to the auriferous region himself, and refuse to turn it over to the lawful owner. The Major exhibited a proper degree of anxiety to learn the results of the interview, and appeared well enough satisfied with the pricehigh as it was.

He was deaf to every proposition of the 'Squire, who was ready almost to double on the purchase money; till at last the latter declared point blank that he meant to stick to the property himself; that the agreement was verbal merely, and he would have ownership in writing, in spite of what Major Davis or anybody else could do. It was in vain that the Major protested and threatened prosecution for swindling, and called witnesses to the transaction. Before sunset, Witherpee was the sole and indisputable proprietor of the newly discovered El Dorado.

It is hardly worth while to state how so extraordinary a financier succeeded when he came to actual prospecting. It was currently reported that there was 'some pretty tall digging going on down in that swamp lot.' It required a lengthy series of geological arguments, with practical illustrations, to convince 'Squire Witherpee that the soil of East Hampton was somewhat feeble in the production of the precious metalsexcept, perhaps, in a metaphorical sense.

When he talked of 'taking the law on those rascals,' he found after all that the best thing he could do was not to move in the matter at all. Mr. Jones and his friend were no rascals, and took pleasure in contributing every cent of the money to the town fund for supporting the poor. Abijah Witherpee was since known to have acknowledged that though rather hard, it was no more than he had deserved, and the change that was wrought in his dealings gained him from that time no more faithful friends than the confederates, Jones and the Major.

REASON, RYHME, AND RYTHM

CHAPTER III.THE INFINITE

No work of art can be considered truly beautiful unless it recalls or reproduces, even in its finite form, some of the divine attributes; not that the work must treat of them, or consciously suggest them to the intellect, but that they must enter into the creation of the artist, that the immediate and intuitive perception of beauty, always attached to their manifestation, may appeal to those faculties or instincts which ever answer in delight when these attributes are suggested to the human spirit; for, consciously or unconsciously, the soul yearns for a clearer view of the beauty of God.

Whatever good there may be desirable by man, more especially good belonging to his moral nature, there will be a corresponding agreeableness in whatever external object reminds him of such good, whether it remind him by arbitrary association, by typical resemblance, or by awakening intuitions of the divine attributes, which he was created to glorify and to enjoy eternally. Leibnitz says:

'The perfections of God are those of our own souls, but He possesses them without limit; He is the exhaustless ocean from which we have received but a drop; we have some power, some wisdom, some love; but God is all power, all wisdom, all love. Order, unity, proportion, harmony, enchant us; painting, sculpture, music, poetry, charm us in the degree in which, in their appropriate spheres, they have succeeded in manifesting fragments of the above: but God is all order, all proportion, all unity, all harmony; and all beauty visible here is but a dim reflex of the eternal rays.'

'The perfections of God are those of our own souls, but He possesses them without limit; He is the exhaustless ocean from which we have received but a drop; we have some power, some wisdom, some love; but God is all power, all wisdom, all love. Order, unity, proportion, harmony, enchant us; painting, sculpture, music, poetry, charm us in the degree in which, in their appropriate spheres, they have succeeded in manifesting fragments of the above: but God is all order, all proportion, all unity, all harmony; and all beauty visible here is but a dim reflex of the eternal rays.'

The fact of our deriving constant pleasure from whatever is a type or semblance of the divine attributes, and from nothing enduringly but that which is, is the most ennobling of all that can be said of human nature, not only setting a great gulf of specific separation between us and the brutes that perish, but it seems a promise of a communion ultimately deep, close, and conscious with the Being in whose darkened manifestations we here unconsciously and instinctively delight. It is at least probable that the higher the order of intelligences, the more of the divine image becomes palpable in all around them, and the redeemed spirits and angels may have perceptions as much more full and rapturous than ours, as ours than those of the beasts and creeping things. It may be received almost as an axiom that no natural instinct or desire can be entirely frustrated, and as these desires for the beautiful are so unfailing that they have not escaped the thinkers of any age, but were held divine of old, and even in heathen countries, it must be admitted that in these visionary pleasures, lightly as we may now be disposed to regard them, there are causes of gratitude, grounds of hope, anchors of faith, more than in all the manifold material gifts with which God mercifully crowns the years and hedges the path of men.

We turn to Plato to show how clearly such ideas were held by the thinkers of antiquity:

'Eternal beauty, not created, not made; exempt from increase or decay; not beautiful in one part and deformed in another, beautiful in such a time, such a place, such a relation; not beauty which hath any sensible parts or anything corporeal, or which may be found comprised in any one thought or science, or residing in any creation different from itself, as in an animal, the earth, or the heavens;but absolute beauty, identical and invariable in itself; beauty in which, would they please the spirit of men, other things must participate, but their creation or destruction brings IT neither diminution, increase, nor the slightest change.'

Plotinus writes in the same spirit:

'Let him who has closed his eyes upon mere sensuous beauty, advance boldly into the depths of the sanctuary. Let him reverently gaze upon the true beauty, the original type of those pale and fleeting images to which he may have hitherto applied the holy name of beautiful.'

We propose to consider reverently and with a humble sense of the limited sphere from which we must regard the infinite, some of the divine attributes, which must, in the finite mode, enter into every creation of artistic excellence. We begin our reflections with the infinite itself.

Infinitethis word is by no means the expression of a clear idea: it is merely the expression of an effort to attain one. It stands for the possible attempt at an impossible conception. Man needed a term by which to point out the direction of this effortthe cloud behind which lay, forever invisible, the object of this attempt. The fact is, that upon the enunciation of any one of that class of terms to which 'infinite' belongsthe class representing thoughts of thoughthe who has a right to say he thinks at all, feels himself called upon, not to entertain a conception, but simply to direct his mental vision toward some given point, in the intellectual firmament, where lies a nebula never to be resolved. And yet to this very point, which the intellect cannot define, are our spirits forever tending. No artistic creation ever fully pleases unless there is given in it some suggestion of this mystic attribute, underlying and permeating all other attributes of Deity. It is the dim unconscious feeling after this attribute which causes the forever recurring dissatisfaction with the finite, which so ruthlessly pursues us through life. It is the source of that vague but tender longing, that restless but dreamy yearning, that haunting melancholy, which characterize human souls created for the enjoyment of the infinite; divining and insatiably thirsting for the absolute.

Let us now attempt to trace some of the various ways in which this feeling after the infinite manifests itself. Plato and his school tried to explain the existence of absolute ideas in the soul by the hypothesis of its preëxistence to that of the body in the bosom of the Absolute, the Infinite, the Eternal; and, consequently, that such ideas are but reminiscences of a more perfect life. We find the following passage in an ode of Wordsworth's:

It seems useless here to enter upon the vexed subject of 'innate ideas,' or to attempt to convince the reader, metaphysically, that the very negation contained in the word finite, necessarily suggests its affirmation in the word infinite. Enough that the idea of the infinite is certainly found in the mind of man, that he seeks it in the material world, in himself, in God. High gifts may have been wrought into the dim soul, which are destined to be gradually awakened through the growing perceptions of the mind. Every spiritual being created by eternal love may have had imparted to him a ray from the sun of eternal love, which, in its due time and place, is to manifest itself in his consciousness. Such participation in God as the primary source of all that is to abide eternally with the redeemed, has, in the present state of our vague consciousness, been described by men who felt its stirrings in their soul as the memory of eternal love. It might more properly be called an intuition of eternal love; such an instinct as leads the chrysalis to prepare for the change which it certainly does not understand. Life, such as the beat of the heart, the action of the lungs, is not manifested to the consciousnessneither is the source of this intuition, which, however, gives evidence of itself by an intuitive feeling of incessant longing. It reveals its presence constantly; sometimes in an undefinable feeling of profound desire, satisfied with no earthly object, yet but vaguely directed to the eternal or divine; sometimes in a profound and absorbing religiosity. This longing exists in an inchoate state; it is a love yet to be developed. From this mystic root springs much that is intellectually great, even the love of scientific certainty. Philosophy may, indeed, almost be termed the science of longing.

Developing in its normal growth, it gives us our true saints; those who live but to love God, and to serve man. But like all human gifts, it may be perverted. It is some such perverted apprehension or illusory longing for the infinite, which causes a man to surrender himself, heart and soul, to the despotic tyranny of some ruling habit, some favorite and engrossing pursuit. Alas! it often leads the most gifted of our race to devote all their energies, thoughts, feelings, to one faulty, fading, changing object, vainly pouring that worship upon the creature, which should be rendered only to the Creator.