The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and PoliticsVarious
General
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 20, No. 118, August, 1867: A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics
Various
American periodicals
At the West, along with much reckless and defiant unbelief in everything
high and good, there is also a great deal of that terror-stricken
pietism which refuses to attend the theatre unless it is very bad
indeed, and is called "Museum." This limits the business of the theatre;
and, as a good theatre is necessarily a very expensive institution, it
improves very slowly, although the Western people are in precisely that
stage of development and culture to which the drama is best adapted and
is most beneficial. We should naturally expect to find the human mind,
in the broad, magnificent West, rising superior to the prejudices
originating in the little sects of little lands. So it will rise in due
time. So it has risen, in some degree. But mere grandeur of nature has
no educating effect upon the soul of man; else, Switzerland would not
have supplied Paris with footmen, and the hackmen of Niagara would spare
the tourist. It is only a human mind that can instruct a human mind.
There is a man in Cincinnati, of small stature, and living in a small
house of a street not easy to find, who is doing more to raise, inform,
and ennoble Cincinnati than all her lovely hills and dales. It is the
truly Reverend A. D. MAYO, minister of the Unitarian Church of the
Redeemer. His walls are not wainscoted, and there is about his house no
umbrageous park nor verdant lawn. It has only pleased Heaven, so far, to
endow him with a fine understanding, a noble heart, and an eloquent
tongue. It is he, and half a dozen such as he, who constitute in great
degree the civilizing force of Cincinnati.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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