The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 03, January, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 01, No. 03, January, 1858: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
the bosom of that fair sheet, sacred to the hymns of quiet
batrachians at home, and the epigrams of a less amiable and less
elevated order of _reptilia_ in other latitudes.
----Who was that person that was so abused some time since for
saying that in the conflict of two races our sympathies naturally go
with the higher? No matter who he was. Now look at what is going on
in India,--a white, superior "Caucasian" race, against a dark-skinned,
inferior, but still "Caucasian" race,--and where are English and
American sympathies? We can't stop to settle all the doubtful
questions; all we know is, that the brute nature is sure to come out
most strongly in the lower race, and it is the general law that the
human side of humanity should treat the brutal side as it does the
same nature in the inferior animals,--tame it or crush it. The India
mail brings stories of women and children outraged and murdered; the
royal stronghold is in the hands of the babe-killers. England takes
down the Map of the World, which she has girdled with empire, and
makes a correction thus:
[Strike-out: DELHI]. _Dele_.
The civilized world says, Amen.
----Do not think, because I talk to you of many subjects briefly,
that I should not find it much lazier work to take each one of them
and dilute it down to an essay. Borrow some of my old college themes
and water my remarks to suit yourselves, as the Homeric heroes did
with their _melas oinos_,--that black, sweet, syrupy wine (?) which
they used to alloy with three parts or more of the flowing stream.
[Could it have been _melasses_, as Webster and his provincials
spell it,--or _Molossa's_, as dear old smattering, chattering,
would-be-College-President, Cotton Mather, has it in the "Magnalia"?
Ponder thereon, ye small antiquaries, who make barn-door-fowl flights
of learning in "Notes and Queries"!--ye Historical Societies, in one
of whose venerable triremes I, too, ascend the stream of time, while
other hands tug at the oars!--ye Amines of parasitical literature,
who pick up your grains of native-grown food with a bodkin, having
gorged upon less honest fare, until, like the great minds Goethe
speaks of, you have "made a Golgotha" of your pages!--ponder thereon!]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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