A check came back
to me at last with these two words on it,--_No funds_. My checkbook was
a volume of waste-paper.
Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank, you
know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's currency
without making new deposits, the next thing will be, _No funds_,--and
then where will you be, my boy? These little bits of paper mean your
gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and you will certainly
break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to your metallic basis.
There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can coin
thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words. What if one
shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that falls of a
June evening on the leaves of his garden? Shall there be no more dew on
those leaves thereafter? Marry, yea,--many drops, large and round and
full of moonlight as those thou shalt have absterged!
Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
decrepitude; with a brain as full of tingling thoughts, such as they
are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particularly
awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
not as yet tanned or ossified, to the finger-touch of all outward
agencies; knowing something of the filmy threads of this web of life in
which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding with
the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth of a
fertilizing inundation than the depth of a narrow artesian well;
finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of the
_grammatophora subtilissima_, and nothing too large in the movement of
the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for me,
the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend has had
his straw in the bunghole of the Universe!
A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
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