Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II.Various
General
Harper's New Monthly Magazine, No. XI.—April, 1851—Vol. II.
Various
American literature -- Periodicals; Civilization -- Periodicals; Culture -- Periodicals
Here he lived and here he worked, when he could get work. He paid no
rent now: he wanted no furniture; he struggled no longer to appear to
the world as his equals appeared; he required no more money than would
procure for his family and himself the barest necessaries of life; he
suffered no interruptions from his fellow-workmen, who thought him a
madman, and kept out of his way; and--most precious privilege of his new
position--he could at last shorten his hours of labor, and lengthen his
hours of study, with impunity. Having no temptations to spend money, no
hard demands of an inexorable landlord to answer, whether he was able or
not, he could now work with his brains as well as his hands, he could
toil at his problems upon the tops of rocks, under the open sky, amid
the silence of the great moor; he could scratch his lines and angles on
thousands of stone tablets freely offered around him. The great ambition
of his life was greatly achieved.
Henceforth, nothing moved him, nothing depressed him. The storms of
winter rushed over his unsheltered dwelling, but failed to dislodge him.
He taught his family to brave solitude and cold in the cavern among the
rocks, as he braved them. In the cell that he had scooped out for his
wife (the roof of which has now fallen in) some of his children died,
and others were born. They point out the rock where he used to sit on
calm summer evenings, absorbed over his tattered copy of Euclid. A
geometrical "puzzle," traced by his hand, still appears on the stone.
When he died, what became of his family, no one can tell. Nothing more
is known of him than that he never quitted the wild place of his exile;
that he continued to the day of his death to live contentedly with his
wife and children, amid a civilized nation, and during a civilized age,
under such a shelter as would hardly serve the first savage tribes of
the most savage country--to live, starving out poverty and want on a
barren wild; defying both to follow him among the desert rocks--to live,
forsaking all things, enduring all things for the love of Knowledge,
which he could still nobly follow through trials and extremities,
without encouragement of fame or profit, without vantage ground of
station or wealth, for its own dear sake. Beyond this, nothing but
conjecture is left. The cell, the bed-place, the lines traced on the
rocks, the inscription of the year in which he hewed his habitation out
of them, are all the memorials that remain of a man, whose strange and
striking story might worthily adorn the pages of a tragic yet glorious
history which is still unwritten--the history of the martyrs of
knowledge in humble life!
A PRISON ANECDOTE.
In the year 1834, a widow lady of good fortune (whom we shall call Mrs.
Newton), resided with her daughter in one of the suburbs nearest to the
metropolis. They lived in fashionable style, and kept an ample
establishment of servants.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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