highest author, we reverence him whose
works continue heroically unwritten, we have also our hopeful word
for those who with pen (from wing of goose loud-cackling, or seraph
God-commissioned) record the thing that is revealed.... Under mask
of quaintest irony, we detect here the deep, storm-tost (nigh
shipwracked) soul, thunder-scarred, semiarticulate, but ever
climbing hopefully toward the peaceful summits of an Infinite
Sorrow.... Yes, thou poor, forlorn Hosea, with Hebrew fire-flaming
soul in thee, for thee also this life of ours has not been without
its aspect of heavenliest pity and laughingest mirth. Conceivable
enough! Through coarse Thersites-cloak, we have revelation of the
heart, wild-glowing, world-clasping, that is in him. Bravely he
grapples with the life-problem as it presents itself to him,
uncombed, shaggy, careless of the "nicer proprieties," inexpert of
"elegant diction," yet with voice audible 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 [OE]dipuses 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