The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103,
May, 1866, by Various

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Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866

Author: Various

Release Date: June 22, 2007 [EBook #21902]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVII.--MAY, 1866.--NO. CIII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND
FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved
to the end of the article.

THE HARMONISTS.

My brother Josiah I call a successful man,--very successful, though only
an attorney in a manufacturing town. But he fixed his goal, and reached
it. He belongs to the ruling class,--men with slow, measuring eyes and
bull-dog jaws,--men who know their own capacity to an atom's weight, and
who go through life with moderate, inflexible, unrepenting steps. He
looks askance at me when I cross his path; he is in the great market
making his way: I learned long ago that there was no place there for me.
Yet I like to look in, out of the odd little corner into which I have
been shoved,--to look in at the great play, never beginning and never
ending, of bargain and sale, for which all the world's but a stage; to
see how men like my brother have been busy, since God blessed all things
he had made, in dragging them down to the trade level, and stamping
price-marks on them. Josiah looks at me grimly, as I said. Jog as
methodically as I will from desk to bed and back to desk again, he
suspects some outlaw blood under the gray head of the fagged-out old
clerk. He indulges in his pictures, his bronzes: I have my high
office-stool, and bedroom in the fifth story of a cheap hotel. Yet he
suspects me of ha