"The trail of the serpent is over them all!"
All lecturers, all professors, all school-masters, have ruts and
grooves in their minds into which their conversation is perpetually
sliding. Did you never, in riding through the woods of a still June
evening, suddenly feel that you had passed into a warm stratum of air,
and in a minute or two strike the chill layer of atmosphere beyond?
Did you never, in cleaving the green waters of the Back Bay,--where
the Provincial blue-noses are in the habit of beating the "Metropolitan"
boat-clubs,--find yourself in a tepid streak, a narrow, local
gulf-stream, a gratuitous warm-bath a little underdone, through
which your glistening shoulders soon flashed, to bring you back
to the cold realities of full-sea temperature? Just so, in talking
with any of the characters above referred to, one not unfrequently
finds a sudden change in the style of the conversation. The
lack-lustre eye, rayless as a Beacon-Street door-plate in August,
all at once fills with light; the face flings itself wide open like
the church-portals when the bride and bridegroom enter; the little
man grows in stature before your eyes, like the small prisoner with
hair on end, beloved yet dreaded of early childhood; you were
talking with a dwarf and an imbecile,--you have a giant and a
trumpet-tongued angel before you!----Nothing but a streak out of a
fifty-dollar lecture.----As when, at some unlooked-for moment, the
mighty fountain-column springs into the air before the astonished
passer-by,--silver-footed, diamond-crowned, rainbow-scarfed,--from
the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet
batrachians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less
elevated order of _reptilia_ in other latitudes.
----Who was that person that was so abused some time since for
saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go
with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on
in India,--a white, superior "Caucasian" race, against a dark-skinned,
inferior, but still "Caucasian" race,--and where are English and
American sympathies? We can't stop to settle all the doubtful
questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out
most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the
human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the
same nature in the inferior animals,--tame it or crush it. The India
mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the
royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes
down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and
makes a correction thus:
[Strike-out: DELHI]. _Dele_.
The civilized world says, Amen.
----Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly,
that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them
and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes
and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did
with their _melas oinos_,--that black, sweet, syrupy wine (?) which
they used to alloy with three parts or more of the flowing stream.
[Could it have been _melasses_, as Webster and his provincials
spell it,--or _Molossa's_, as dear old smattering, chattering,
would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the "Magnalia"?
Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries, who make barn-door-fowl flights
of learning in "Notes and Queries"!--ye Historical Societies, in one
of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while
other hands tug at the oars!--ye Amines of parasitical literature,
who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a bodkin, having
gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great minds Goethe
speaks of, you have "made a Golgotha" of your pages!--ponder thereon!]
----Before you go, this morning, I want to read you a copy of verses.
You will understand by the title that they are written in an
imaginary character. I don't doubt they will fit some family-man
well enough. I send it forth as "Oak Hall" projects a coat, on
_a priori_ grounds of conviction that it will suit somebody. There
is no loftier illustration of faith than this. It believes that a
soul has been clad in flesh; that tender parents have fed and
nurtured it; that its mysterious _compages_ or frame-work has
survived its myriad exposures and reached the stature of maturity;
that the Man, now self-determining, has given in his adhesion to the
traditions and habits of the race in favor of artificial clothing;
that he will, having all the world to choose from, select the very
locality where this audacious generalization has been acted upon. It
builds a garment cut to the pattern of an Idea, and trusts that
Nature will model a material shape to fit it. There is a prophecy in
every seam, and its pockets are full of inspiration.--Now hear the
verses.