Let us make haste,
then, before it is too late,--before the very Sphinx is guessed, and
the Boodh himself baptized in Croton water; and, like the Dutchmen in
Hans Christian Andersen's story, who put on the galoches of happiness
and stepped out into the Middle Ages, let us slip our feet into the
sandals of imagination and step out into the desert or the jungle.
One who expressed his Oriental experiences in an epic of fresh and
thrilling sensations has written,--"If a man be not born of his mother
with a natural Chifney bit in his mouth, there comes to him a time for
loathing the wearisome ways of society,--a time for not liking tamed
people,--a time for not dancing quadrilles,--a time for pretending that
Milton, and Shelley, and all sorts of mere dead people are greater in
death than the first living lord of the treasury,--a time, in short,
for scoffing and railing, for speaking lightly of the opera, and all
our most cherished institutions. A little while you are free and
unlabelled, like the ground you compass; but civilization is coming,
and coming; you and your much-loved waste-lands will be surely
inclosed, and sooner or later you will be brought down to a state of
utter usefulness,--the ground will be curiously sliced into acres and
roods and perches, and you, for all you sit so smartly on your saddle,
you will be caught, you will be taken up from travel, as a colt from
grass, to be trained, and matched, and run.
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