enough to whoso hath ears,
up there on the gravelly side-hills, or down on the splashy,
indiarubber-like salt-marshes of native Jaalam. To this soul also the
_Necessity of Creating_ somewhat has unveiled its awful front. If not
Oedipuses and Electras and Alcestises, then in God's name Birdofredum
Sawins! These also shall get born into the world, and filch (if so need)
a Zingali subsistence therein, these lank, omnivorous Yankees of his. He
shall paint the Seen, since the Unseen will not sit to him. Yet in him
also are Nibelungen-lays, and Iliads, and Ulysses-wanderings, and Divine
Comedies,--if only once he could come at them! Therein lies much, nay
all; for what truly is this which we name _All_, but that which we do
_not_ possess?... Glimpses also are given us of an old father Ezekiel,
not without paternal pride, as is the wont of such. A brown,
parchment-hided old man of the geoponic or bucolic species, gray-eyed,
we fancy, _queued_ perhaps, with much weather-cunning and plentiful
September-gale memories, bidding fair in good time to become the Oldest
Inhabitant. After such hasty apparition, he vanishes and is seen no
more.... Of 'Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., Pastor of the First Church in
Jaalam,' we have small care to speak here. Spare touch in him of his
Melesigenes namesake, save, haply, the--blindness! A tolerably
caliginose, nephelegeretous elderly gentleman, with infinite faculty of
sermonizing, muscularized by long practice and excellent digestive
apparatus, and, for the rest, well-meaning enough, and with small
private illuminations (somewhat tallowy, it is to be feared) of his own.
To him, there, 'Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam,' our Hosea
presents himself as a quite inexplicable Sphinx-riddle. A rich poverty
of Latin and Greek,--so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic
through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,--but naught farther? O
purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are
things in him incommunicable by stroke of birch! Did it ever enter that
old bewildered head of thine that there was the _Possibility of the
Infinite_ in him? To thee, quite wingless (and even featherless) biped,
has not so much even as a dream of wings ever come? 'Talented young
parishioner'? Among the Arts whereof thou art _Magister_, does that of
_seeing_ happen to be one? Unhappy _Artium Magister!_ Somehow a Nemean
lion, fulvous, torrid-eyed, dry-nursed in broad-howling
sand-wildernesses of a