By the way, if we had energy enough to-day to wish anything, it would be
to find ourselves far away amid flashing seas and wild winds, hunting
icebergs, with Church for our Columbus, his banner of _Excelsior_
streaming over us, his wondrous eye piercing the distant wreaths of spray,
in search of domes and pinnacles of opal and lapis lazuli, turned, now to
diamonds, now to marble, by sun and shade. One whose good fortune it was
to be with the young discoverer at Niagara, came away with the feeling of
having acquired a new sense, by the potent magic of genius.
But to-day, Art is nothing--genius is nothing--but no! that is
blasphemous. It is we that are nothing--if not stupid. Dullness is the
universe. The grasshoppers are too faint to sing, the birds sit still on
the boughs, waiting for the leaves to fan them. Children are wilted into
silence and slumberous nonentity; boys do not bathe to-day--they welter,
hour after hour, in the dark water near the shaded rock. Even they and the
tadpoles can hardly be seen to wriggle. The cow has found a shade, and,
preferring repose to munching, lies contented under the one great elm
mercifully left in the middle of her pasture.
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