McGuffey's Sixth Eclectic Reader

Examples — Sitting 29

The cadi raised his head and looked about the assembly, as if to interrogate the faces, then stroked his beard, and relapsed into his meditations.

"Ali is defeated," said the sheik to Omar, with a smile, "The fox is not yet born more cunning than the worthy Mansour."

"I am lost!" cried the Banian. "O Omar, have you saved me only to cast me down from the highest pinnacle of joy to the depths of despair? Persuade your father to spare me, that I may owe my life to you a second time."

"Well, my son," said Mansour, "doubtless you are shrewd, but this will teach you that your father knows rather more than you do. The cadi is about to decide: try whether you can dictate his decree."

"It is mere child's play," answered Omar, shrugging his shoulders; "but since you desire it, my father, you shall lose your suit." He rose, and taking a piaster from his girdle, put it into the hand of the Banian, who laid it before the judge.

"Illustrious cadi," said Omar, "this young man is ready to fulfill his engagement. This is what he offers Mansour--piaster. In itself this coin is of little value; but examine it closely, and you will see that it is stamped with the likeness of the sultan, our glorious master. May God destroy and confound all who disobey his highness!

"It is this precious likeness that we offer you," added he, turning to Mansour; "if it pleases you, you are paid; to say that it displeases you is an insult to the pasha, a crime punishable by death; and I am sure that our worthy cadi will not become your accomplice--he who has always been and always will be the faithful servant of an the sultans."

When Omar had finished speaking, all eyes turned toward the cadi, who, more impenetrable than ever, stroked his face and waited for the old man to come to his aid. Mansour was agitated and embarrassed. The silence of the cadi and the assembly terrified him, and he cast a supplicating glance toward his son.

"My father," said Omar, "permit this young man to thank you for the lesson of prudence which you have given him by frightening him a little. He knows well that it was you who sent me to his aid, and that all this is a farce. No one is deceived by hearing the son oppose the Father, and who has ever doubted Mansour's experience and generosity?"

"No one," interrupted the cadi, starting up like a man suddenly awakened from a dream, "and I least of all; and this is why I have permitted you to speak, my young Solomon. I wished to honor in you the wisdom of your father; but another time avoid meddling with his highness's name; it is not safe to sport with the lion's paws. The matter is settled. The necklace is worth a hundred thousand piasters, is it not, Mansour? This madcap, shall give you, therefore, a hundred thousand piasters, and all parties will be satisfied."

NOTES--A cadi in the Mohammedan countries corresponds to our magistrate.

A sheik among the Arabs and Moors, may mean simply an old man, or, as in this case, a man of eminence.

A Banian is a Hindoo merchant, particularly one who visits foreign countries on business.

Jidda is a city in Arabia, on the Red Sea

A pasha is the governor of a Turkish province.

The Turkish piaster was formerly worth twenty-five cents: it is now worth only about eight cents.

LXXV. THANATOPSIS. (275)

To him who in the love of Nature holds Communion with her visible forms, she speaks A various language: for his gayer hours She has a voice of gladness, and a smile And eloquence of beauty; and she glides Into his darker musings, with a mild And healing sympathy, that steals away Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts Of the last hitter hour come like a blight Over thy spirit, and sad images Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall, And breathless darkness, and the narrow house, Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;-- Go forth, under the open sky, and list To Nature's teachings, while from all around-- Earth and her waters, and the depths of air-- Comes a still voice,--

Yet a few days, and thee The all-beholding sun shall see no more In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground, Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears, Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again; And, lost each human trace, surrendering up Thine individual being, shalt thou go To mix forever with the elements; To be a brother to the insensible rock And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mold.

Yet not to thine eternal resting place Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down With patriarchs of the infant world,--with kings, The powerful of the earth,--the wise, the good, Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,-- All in one mighty sepulcher.

The hills, Rock-ribbed, and ancient as the sun; the vales Stretching in pensive quietness between; The venerable woods; rivers that move In majesty, and the complaining brooks, That make the meadows green; and, poured round all, Old Ocean's gray and melancholy waste,-- Are but the solemn decorations all Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun, The planets, all the infinite host of heaven, Are shining on the sad abodes of death, Through the still lapse of ages.

All that tread The globe are but a handful to the tribes That slumber in its bosom. Take the wings Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness, Or lose thyself in the continuous woods Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound Save his own dashings,--yet the dead are there: And millions in those solitudes, since first The flight of years began, have laid them down In their last sleep,--the dead reign there alone.

So shalt thou rest; and what if thou withdraw In silence from the living, and no friend Take note of thy departure? All that breathe Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care Plod on, and each one as before will chase His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave Their mirth and their employments, and shall come And make their bed with thee. As the long train Of ages glide away, the sons of men-- The youth in life's green spring, and he who goes In the full strength of years, matron and maid, The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man Shall one by one be gathered to thy side By those who in their turn shall follow them.

So live, that when thy summons comes to join The innumerable caravan, which moves To that mysterious realm, where each shall take His chamber in the silent halls of death, Thou go not, like the quarry slave at night, Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave, Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. --Bryant.

NOTES.--Thanatopsis is composed of two Greek words, thanatos, meaning death, and opsis, a view. The word, therefore, signifies a view of death, or reflections on death.

Barca is in the northeastern part of Africa: the southern and eastern portions of the country are a barren desert.

The Oregon (or Columbia) River is the most important river of the United States emptying into the Pacific. The Lewis and Clark Expedition (1803-1806) had first explored the country through which it flows only five years before the poem was written.

LXXVI. INDIAN JUGGLERS. (278)

William Hazlitt, 1778-1830, was born in Maidstone, England. His father was a Unitarian clergyman, and he was sent to a college of that denomination to be educated for the ministry; but having a greater taste for art than theology, he resolved, on leaving school, to devote himself to painting. He succeeded so well in his efforts as to meet the warmest commendation of his friends, but did not succeed in satisfying his own fastidious taste. On this account he threw away his pencil and took up his pen. His works, though numerous, are, with the exception of a life of Napoleon, chiefly criticisms on literature and art.

Hazlitt is thought to have treated his contemporaries with an unjust severity; but his genial appreciation of the English classics, and the thorough and loving manner in which he discusses their merits, make his essays the delight of every lover of those perpetual wellsprings of intellectual pleasure. His "Table Talk," "Characters of Shakespeare's Plays," "Lectures on the English Poets," and "Lectures on the Literature of the Elizabethan Age," are the works that exhibit his style and general merits in their most favorable light. ###

Coming forward and seating himself on the ground, in his white dress and tightened turban, the chief of the Indian jugglers begins with tossing up two brass balls, which is what any of us could do, and concludes by keeping up four at the same time, which is what none of us could do to save our lives, not if we were to take our whole lives to do it in.

Is it then a trifling power we see at work, or is it not something next to miraculous? It is the utmost stretch of human ingenuity, which nothing but the bending the faculties of body and mind to it from the tenderest infancy with incessant, ever-anxious application up to manhood, can accomplish or make even a slight approach to. Man, thou art a wonderful animal, and thy ways past finding out! Thou canst do strange things, but thou turnest them to small account!

To conceive of this extraordinary dexterity, distracts the imagination and makes admiration breathless. Yet it costs nothing to the performer, any more than if it were a mere mechanical deception with which he had nothing to do, but to watch and laugh at the astonishment of the spectators. A single error of a hair's breadth, of the smallest conceivable portion of time, would be fatal; the precision of the movements must be like a mathematical truth; their rapidity is like lightning.

To catch four balls in succession, in less than a second of time, and deliver them back so as to return with seeming consciousness to the hand again; to make them revolve around him at certain intervals, like the planets in their spheres; to make them chase each other like sparkles of fire, or shoot up like flowers or meteors; to throw them behind his back, and twine them round his neck like ribbons, or like serpents; to do what appears an impossibility, and to do it with all the ease, the grace, the carelessness imaginable; to laugh at, to play with the glittering mockeries, to follow them with his eye as if he could fascinate them with its lambent fire, or as if he had only to see that they kept time with the music on the stage--there is something in all this which he who does not admire may be quite sure he never really admired anything in the whole course of his life. It is skill surmounting difficulty, and beauty triumphing over skill. It seems as if the difficulty, once mastered, naturally resolved itself into ease and grace, and as if, to be overcome at all, it must be overcome without an effort. The smallest awkwardness or want of pliancy or self-possession would stop the whole process. It is the work of witchcraft, and yet sport for children.

Some of the other feats are quite as curious and wonderful--such as the balancing the artificial tree, and shooting a bird from each branch through a quill--though none of them have the elegance or facility of the keeping up of the brass balls. You are in pain for the result, and glad when the experiment is over; they are not accompanied with the same unmixed, unchecked delight as the former; and I would not give much to be merely astonished without being pleased at the same time. As to the swallowing of the sword, the police ought to interfere to prevent it.

When I saw the Indian juggler do the same things before, his feet were bare, and he had large rings on his toes, which he kept turning round all the time of the performance, as if they moved of themselves.

The hearing a speech in Parliament drawled or stammered out by the honorable member or the noble lord, the ringing the changes on their commonplaces, which anyone could repeat after them as well as they, stirs me not a jot,--shakes not my good opinion of myself. I ask what there is that I can do as well as this. Nothing. What have I been doing all my life? Have I been idle, or have I nothing to show for all my labor and pains? Or have I passed my time in pouring words like water into empty sieves, rolling a stone up a hill and then down again, trying to prove an argument in the teeth of facts, and looking for causes in the dark, and not finding them? Is there no one thing in which I can challenge competition, that I can bring as an instance of exact perfection, in which others can not find a flaw?

The utmost I can pretend to is to write a description of what this fellow can do. I can write a book: so can many others who have not even learned to spell. What abortions are these essays! What errors, what ill-pieced transitions, what crooked reasons, what lame conclusions! How little is made out, and that little how ill! Yet they are the best I can do.

I endeavor to recollect all I have ever heard or thought upon a subject, and to express it as neatly as I can. Instead of writing on four subjects at a time, it is as much as I can manage, to keep the thread of one discourse clear and unentangled. I have also time on my hands to correct my opinions and polish my periods; but the one I can not, and the other I will not, do. I am fond of arguing; yet, with a good deal of pains and practice, it is often much as I can do to beat my man, though he may be a very indifferent hand. A common fencer would disarm his adversary in the twinkling of an eye, unless he were a professor like himself. A stroke of wit will sometimes produce this effect, but there is no such power or superiority in sense or reasoning. There is no complete mastery of execution to be shown there; and you hardly know the professor from the impudent pretender or the mere clown.

LXXVII. ANTONY OVER CAESAR'S DEAD BODY. (281)

Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears: I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him. The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones; So let it be with Caesar. The noble Brutus Hath told you Caesar was ambitious: If it were so, it was a grievous fault, And grievously hath Caesar answered it. Here, under leave of Brutus and the rest-- For Brutus is an honorable man; So are they all, all honorable men-- Come I to speak in Caesar's funeral.