Did you never, in walking in the fields, come across a large flat stone, which had lain, nobody knows how long, just where you found it, with the grass forming a little hedge, as it were, all round it, close to its edges, - and have you not, in obedience to a kind of feeling that told you it had been lying there long enough, insinuated your stick or your foot or your fingers under its edge and turned it over as a housewife turns a cake, when she says to herself, "It's done brown enough by this time"? What an odd revelation, and what an unforeseen and unpleasant surprise to a small community, the very existence of which you had not suspected, until the sudden dismay and scattering among its members produced by your turning the old stone over! Blades of grass flattened down, colorless, matted together, as if they had been bleached and ironed; hideous crawling creatures, some of them coleopterous or horny-shelled, - turtle-bugs one wants to call them; some of them softer, but cunningly spread out and compressed like Lepine watches; (Nature never loses a crack or a crevice, mind you, or a joint in a tavern bedstead, but she always has one of her flat-pattern five timekeepers to slide into it;) black, glossy crickets, with their long filaments sticking out like the whips of four-horse stage-coaches; motionless, slug-like creatures, young larvae, perhaps more horrible in their pulpy stillness than even in the infernal wriggle of maturity! But no sooner is the stone turned and the wholesome light of day let upon this compressed and blinded community of creeping things, than all of them which enjoy the luxury of legs - and some of them have a good many - rush round wildly, butting each other and everything in their way, and end in a general stampede for underground retreats from the region poisoned by sunshine.NEXT YEAR you will find the grass growing tall and green where the stone lay; the ground-bird builds her nest where the beetle had his hole; the dandelion and the buttercup are growing there, and the broad fans of insect-angels open and shut over their golden disks, as the rhythmic waves of blissful consciousness pulsate through their glorified being.
- The young fellow whom they call John saw fit to say, in his very familiar way, - at which I do not choose to take offence, but which I sometimes think it necessary to repress, - that I was coming it rather strong on the butterflies.
No, I replied; there is meaning in each of those images, - the butterfly as well as the others.The stone is ancient error.The grass is human nature borne down and bleached of all its colour by it.The shapes which are found beneath are the crafty beings that thrive in darkness, and the weaker organisms kept helpless by it.
He who turns the stone over is whosoever puts the staff of truth to the old lying incubus, no matter whether he do it with a serious face or a laughing one.The next year stands for the coming time.
Then shall the nature which had lain blanched and broken rise in its full stature and native hues in the sunshine.Then shall God's minstrels build their nests in the hearts of a new-born humanity.
Then shall beauty - Divinity taking outlines and color - light upon the souls of men as the butterfly, image of the beatified spirit rising from the dust, soars from the shell that held a poor grub, which would never have found wings, had not the stone been lifted.
You never need think you can turn over any old falsehood without a terrible squirming and scattering of the horrid little population that dwells under it.
- Every real thought on every real subject knocks the wind out of somebody or other.As soon as his breath comes back, he very probably begins to expend it in hard words.These are the best evidence a man can have that he has said something it was time to say.Dr.Johnson was disappointed in the effect of one of his pamphlets."I think I have not been attacked enough for it," he said; - "attack is the reaction; I never think I have hit hard unless it rebounds."- If a fellow attacked my opinions in print would I reply? Not I.
Do you think I don't understand what my friend, the Professor, long ago called THE HYDROSTATIC PARADOX OF CONTROVERSY?
Don't know what that means? - Well, I will tell you.You know, that, if you had a bent tube, one arm of which was of the size of a pipe-stem, and the other big enough to hold the ocean, water would stand at the same height in one as in the other.Controversy equalizes fools and wise men in the same way, - AND THE FOOLS KNOWIT.
- No, but I often read what they say about other people.There are about a dozen phrases which all come tumbling along together, like the tongs, and the shovel, and the poker, and the brush, and the bellows, in one of those domestic avalanches that everybody knows.
If you get one, you get the whole lot.
What are they? - Oh, that depends a good deal on latitude and longitude.Epithets follow the isothermal lines pretty accurately.
Grouping them in two families, one finds himself a clever, genial, witty, wise, brilliant, sparkling, thoughtful, distinguished, celebrated, illustrious scholar and perfect gentleman, and first writer of the age; or a dull, foolish, wicked, pert, shallow, ignorant, insolent, traitorous, black-hearted outcast, and disgrace to civilization.
What do I think determines the set of phrases a man gets? - Well, Ishould say a set of influences something like these: - 1st.
Relationships, political, religious, social, domestic.2d.
Oyster, in the form of suppers given to gentlemen connected with criticism.I believe in the school, the college, and the clergy;but my sovereign logic, for regulating public opinion - which means commonly the opinion of half a dozen of the critical gentry - is the following MAJOR PROPOSITION.Oysters AU NATUREL.MINORPROPOSITION.The same "scalloped." CONCLUSION.That - (here insert entertainer's name) is clever, witty, wise, brilliant, - and the rest.