| |
| WITH its baby rivers and little towns, each with its abbey or its cathedral; | |
| with voices—one voice perhaps, echoing through the transept—the | |
| criterion of suitability and convenience; and Italy with its equal | |
| shores—contriving an epicureanism from which the grossness has been | |
| |
| extracted: and Greece with its goats and its gourds, the nest of modified illusions: | 5 |
| and France, the “chrysalis of the nocturnal butterfly” in | |
| whose products, mystery of construction diverts one from that which was the object of one’s | |
| search—substance at the core: and the far East with its snails, its emotional | |
| |
| shorthand and jade cockroaches, its rock crystal and its imperturbability, | |
| all of museum quality: and America where there | 10 |
| is the little old ramshackle victoria in the south, where cigars are smoked on the | |
| street in the north; where there are no proof readers, no silkworms, no digressions; | |
| |
| the wild man’s land; grass-less, links-less, language-less country—in which letters are written | |
| not in Spanish, not in Greek, not in Latin, not in shorthand | |
| but in plain American which cats and dogs can read! The letter “a” in psalm and calm, when | 15 |
| pronounced with the sound of “a” in candle, is very noticeable but | |
| |
| why should continents of misapprehension have to be accounted for by the | |
| fact? Does it follow that because there are poisonous toadstools | |
| which resemble mushrooms, both are dangerous? In the case of mettlesomeness which may be | |
| mistaken for appetite, of heat which may appear to be haste, no con- | 20 |
| |
| conclusions may be drawn. To have misapprehended the matter, is to have confessed | |
| that one has not looked far enough. The sublimated wisdom | |
| of China, Egyptian discernment, the cataclysmic torrent of emotion compressed | |
| in the verbs of the Hebrew language, the books of the man who is able | |
| |
| to say, “I envy nobody but him and him only, who catches more fish than | 25 |
| I do,”—the flower and fruit of all that noted superi- | |
| ority—should one not have stumbled upon it in America, must one imagine | |
| that it is not there? It has never been confined to one locality. | |
| |
