Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was produced from images generously made available by Cornell University Digital Collections). THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY. _A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._ VOL. XVII.--MAY, 1866.--NO. CIII. Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved to the end of the article. THE HARMONISTS. My brother Josiah I call a successful man,--very successful, though only an attorney in a manufacturing town. But he fixed his goal, and reached it. He belongs to the ruling class,--men with slow, measuring eyes and bull-dog jaws,--men who know their own capacity to an atom's weight, and who go through life with moderate, inflexible, unrepenting steps. He looks askance at me when I cross his path; he is in the great market making his way: I learned long ago that there was no place there for me. Yet I like to look in, out of the odd little corner into which I have been shoved,--to look in at the great play, never beginning and never ending, of bargain and sale, for which all the world's but a stage; to see how men like my brother have been busy, since God blessed all things he had made, in dragging them down to the trade level, and stamping price-marks on them. Josiah looks at me grimly, as I said. Jog as methodically as I will from desk to bed and back to desk again, he suspects some outlaw blood under the gray head of the fagged-out old clerk. He indulges in his pictures, his bronzes: I have my high office-stool, and bedroom in the fifth story of a cheap hotel. Yet he suspects me of having forced a way out of the actual common-sense world by sheer force of whims and vagaries, and to have pre-empted a homestead for myself in some dream-land, where neither he nor the tax-gatherer can enter. "It won't do," he said to-day, when I was there (for I use his books now and then). "Old Pere Bonhours, you're poring over? Put it down, and come take some clam soup. Much those fellows knew about life! Zachary! Zachary! you have kept company with shadows these forty years, until you have grown peaked and gaunt yourself. When will you go to work and be a live man?" I knew we were going to have the daily drill which Josiah gave to his ideas; so I rolled the book up to take with me, while he rubbed his spectacles angrily, and went on. "I tell you, the world's a great property-exchanging machine, where everything has its weight and value; a great, inexorable machine,--and whoever tries to shirk his work in it will be crushed! Crushed! Think of your old friend Knowles!"