第21章

To compare these advantages with the virtues and utilities would be foolish.Much of the noblest work in life is done by ill-dressed, awkward, ungainly persons; but that is no more reason for undervaluing good manners and what we call high-breeding, than the fact that the best part of the sturdy labor of the world is done by men with exceptionable hands is to be urged against the use of Brown Windsor as a preliminary to appearance in cultivated society.

I mean to stand up for this poor lady, whose usefulness in the world is apparently problematical.She seems to me like a picture which has fallen from its gilded frame and lies, face downward, on the dusty floor.The picture never was as needful as a window or a door, but it was pleasant to see it in its place, and it would be pleasant to see it there again, and I, for one, should be thankful to have the Lady restored by some turn of fortune to the position from which she has been so cruelly cast down.

--I have asked the Landlady about the young man sitting near her, the same who attracted my attention the other day while I was talking, as I mentioned.He passes most of his time in a private observatory, it appears; a watcher of the stars.That I suppose gives the peculiar look to his lustrous eyes.The Master knows him and was pleased to tell me something about him.

You call yourself a Poet,--he said,--and we call you so, too, and so you are; I read your verses and like 'em.But that young man lives in a world beyond the imagination of poets, let me tell you.The daily home of his thought is in illimitable space, hovering between the two eternities.In his contemplations the divisions of time run together, as in the thought of his Maker.With him also,--I say it not profanely,--one day is as a thousand years and a thousand years as one day.

This account of his occupation increased the interest his look had excited in me, and I have observed him more particularly and found out more about him.Sometimes, after a long night's watching, he looks so pale and worn, that one would think the cold moonlight had stricken him with some malign effluence such as it is fabled to send upon those who sleep in it.At such times he seems more like one who has come from a planet farther away from the sun than our earth, than like one of us terrestrial creatures.His home is truly in the heavens, and he practises an asceticism in the cause of science almost comparable to that of Saint Simeon Stylites.Yet they tell me he might live in luxury if he spent on himself what he spends on science.His knowledge is of that strange, remote character, that it seems sometimes almost superhuman.He knows the ridges and chasms of the moon as a surveyor knows a garden-plot he has measured.He watches the snows that gather around the poles of Mars; he is on the lookout for the expected comet at the moment when its faint stain of diffused light first shows itself; he analyzes the ray that comes from the sun's photosphere; he measures the rings of Saturn; he counts his asteroids to see that none are missing, as the shepherd counts the sheep in his flock.A strange unearthly being; lonely, dwelling far apart from the thoughts and cares of the planet on which he lives,--an enthusiast who gives his life to knowledge; a student of antiquity, to whom the records of the geologist are modern pages in the great volume of being, and the pyramids a memorandum of yesterday, as the eclipse or occultation that is to take place thousands of years hence is an event of to-morrow in the diary without beginning and without end where he enters the aspect of the passing moment as it is read on the celestial dial.

In very marked contrast with this young man is the something more than middle-aged Register of Deeds, a rusty, sallow, smoke-dried looking personage, who belongs to this earth as exclusively as the other belongs to the firmament.His movements are as mechanical as those of a pendulum,--to the office, where he changes his coat and plunges into messuages and building-lots; then, after changing his coat again, back to our table, and so, day by day, the dust of years gradually gathering around him as it does on the old folios that fill the shelves all round the great cemetery of past transactions of which he is the sexton.

Of the Salesman who sits next him, nothing need be said except that he is good-looking, rosy, well-dressed, and of very polite manners, only a little more brisk than the approved style of carriage permits, as one in the habit of springing with a certain alacrity at the call of a customer.

You would like to see, I don't doubt, how we sit at the table, and Iwill help you by means of a diagram which shows the present arrangement of our seats.

4 3 2 1 1413

---------------------------------

O O O O O O

5 | OBreakfast-TableO |12

O O O O O O

---------------------------------

6 7 8 9 1011

1.The Poet.

2.The Master Of Arts.

3.The Young Girl (Scheherezade).

4.The Lady.

5.The Landlady.

6.Dr.B.Franklin.

7.That Boy.

8.The Astronomer.

9.The Member of the Haouse.

10.The Register of Deeds.

11.The Salesman.

12.The Capitalist.

13.The Man of Letters(?).

14.The Scarabee.

Our young Scheherezade varies her prose stories now and then, as Itold you, with compositions in verse, one or two of which she has let me look over.Here is one of them, which she allowed me to copy.It is from a story of hers, "The Sun-Worshipper's Daughter," which you may find in the periodical before mentioned, to which she is a contributor, if your can lay your hand upon a file of it.I think our Scheherezade has never had a lover in human shape, or she would not play so lightly with the firebrands of the great passion.

FANTASIA.

Kiss mine eyelids, beauteous Morn, Blushing into life new-born!

Lend me violets for my hair, And thy russet robe to wear, And thy ring of rosiest hue Set in drops of diamond dew!

Kiss my cheek, thou noontide ray, >From my Love so far away!

Let thy splendor streaming down Turn its pallid lilies brown, Till its darkening shades reveal Where his passion pressed its seal!

Kiss my lips, thou Lord of light, Kiss my lips a soft good night!

Westward sinks thy golden car;

Leave me but the evening star, And my solace that shall be, Borrowing all its light from thee!