The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 81, July, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 14, No. 81, July, 1864: A Magazine of Literature, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Yet there were moments, as many persons had noticed, when the
great-grandpapa would suddenly take stronger hues of life. It was as if
his faded figure had been colored over anew, or at least, as he and
Pansie moved along the street, as if a sunbeam had fallen across him,
instead of the gray gloom of an instant before. His chilled
sensibilities had probably been touched and quickened by the warm
contiguity of his little companion through the medium of her hand, as it
stirred within his own, or some inflection of her voice that set his
memory ringing and chiming with forgotten sounds. While that music
lasted, the old man was alive and happy. And there were seasons, it
might be, happier than even these, when Pansie had been kissed and put
to bed, and Grandsir Dolliver sat by his fireside gazing in among the
massive coals, and absorbing their glow into those cavernous abysses
with which all men communicate. Hence come angels or fiends into our
twilight musings, according as we may have peopled them in by-gone
years. Over our friend's face, in the rosy flicker of the fire-gleam,
stole an expression of repose and perfect trust that made him as
beautiful to look at, in his high-backed chair, as the child Pansie on
her pillow; and sometimes the spirits that were watching him beheld a
calm surprise draw slowly over his features and brighten into joy, yet
not go vividly as to break his evening quietude. The gate of heaven had
been kindly left ajar, that this forlorn old creature might catch a
glimpse within. All the night afterwards, he would be semi-conscious of
an intangible bliss diffused through the fitful lapses of an old man's
slumber, and would awake, at early dawn, with a faint thrilling of the
heart-strings, as if there had been music just now wandering over them.
CURRENCY.
It is not only for gold that men labor, fight, and die. One labors long
to perfect an invention; another, to illustrate a theory; a third, to
express a sentiment; a fourth, to acquire real estate. With success, the
first has a machine; the second, a treatise; the third, a poem; the
fourth, a deed. Perhaps no other four persons would willingly expend the
same amount of labor on the same objects; yet this difference of
estimate effects no difference in the objects. Estimation, therefore, or
value, is not a quality of those objects, but a state of mind in
relation to them; accordingly, the poem has value as well as the
machine,--the deed, as well as the wealth it defines. The value of the
deed is, however, widely different from that of the wealth. The value of
the wealth is based on desire, that of the deed on right, though in
neither case exclusively, as, in a general sense, value always involves
both desire and right, and is, therefore, a commercial relation,
resulting from a state of society.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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