The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 101, March, 1866: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
Here is a stall of ripe, juicy mutton, perhaps from the county of St.
Lawrence, in Northeastern New York. This is the most healthful and
easily digested of all meats. Its juiciness and nutritiousness are
visible in the trumpeter-like cheeks of the well-fed John Bull. The
domestic Anglo-Saxon is a mutton-eater. Let his offshoots here and
elsewhere follow suit. There is no such timber to repair the waste of
the human frame. It is a fuel easily combustible in the visceral grate
of the stomach. The mutton-eater is eupeptic. His dreams are airy and
lightsome. Somnus descends smiling to his nocturnal pillow, and not clad
in the portentous panoply of indigestion, which rivals a guilty
conscience in its night visions. The mutton department of Quincy Market
is all that it should be.
Next we come upon "fowl of game," wild ducks, pigeons, etc.--What has
become of those shoals of pigeons, those herrings of the air, which used
in the gloom and glory of a breezy autumnal day to darken the sun in
their flight, like the discharge of the Xerxean arrows at Thermopylae?
The eye sweeps the autumnal sky in vain now for any such winged
phenomenon, at least here in New England. The days of the bough-house
and pigeon-stand strewn with barley seem to have gone by. Swift of
flight and shapely in body is the North American wild pigeon, running
upon the air fleeter than Anacreon's dove. He can lay any latitude under
contribution in a few hours, flying incredible distances during the
process of digestion. He is an ornament to the air, and the pot
also.--Here might be a descendant of Bryant's waterfowl; but its
journeyings along the pathless coast of the upper atmosphere are at an
end.
"All flesh is not the same flesh; but there is one kind of flesh of men,
another flesh of beasts, another of fishes, and another of birds." The
matter composing the vegetables and the lower animals is promoted, as
it were, by being eaten by man and incorporated into his body, which is
a breathing house not made with hands built over the boundary-line of
two worlds, the sensible and noumenal. "The human body is the highest
chemical laboratory which matter can reach. In that body the highest
qualities and richest emoluments are imparted to it, and it is indorsed
with a divine superscription." It there becomes part and parcel of the
eye, the organ of light and the throne of expression,--of the blood,
which is so eloquent in cheek and brow,--of the nerves, the
telegraph-wires of the soul,--of the persuasive tongue,--of the
tear-drop, the dew of emotion, which only the human eye can shed,--of
the glossy tresses of beauty, the nets of love.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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