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- 11881
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- 11823
- text
- descending in quest of improbable dinners, are to be seen drawn up along
the curb in front of the eating-houses, like lean rows of broken-hearted
pelicans on a beach; their pockets loose, hanging down and flabby, like
the pelican's pouches when fish are hard to be caught. But these poor,
penniless devils still strive to make ample amends for their physical
forlornness, by resolutely reveling in the region of blissful ideals.
They are mostly artists of various sorts; painters, or sculptors, or
indigent students, or teachers of languages, or poets, or fugitive
French politicians, or German philosophers. Their mental tendencies,
however heterodox at times, are still very fine and spiritual upon the
whole; since the vacuity of their exchequers leads them to reject the
coarse materialism of Hobbs, and incline to the airy exaltations of the
Berkelyan philosophy. Often groping in vain in their pockets, they can
not but give in to the Descartian vortices; while the abundance of
leisure in their attics (physical and figurative), unite with the
leisure in their stomachs, to fit them in an eminent degree for that
undivided attention indispensable to the proper digesting of the
sublimated Categories of Kant; especially as Kant (can't) is the one
great palpable fact in their pervadingly impalpable lives. These are the
glorious paupers, from whom I learn the profoundest mysteries of things;
since their very existence in the midst of such a terrible
precariousness of the commonest means of support, affords a problem on
which many speculative nutcrackers have been vainly employed. Yet let me
here offer up three locks of my hair, to the memory of all such glorious
paupers who have lived and died in this world. Surely, and truly I honor
them--noble men often at bottom--and for that very reason I make bold to
be gamesome about them; for where fundamental nobleness is, and
fundamental honor is due, merriment is never accounted irreverent. The
fools and pretenders of humanity, and the impostors and baboons among
the gods, these only are offended with raillery; since both those gods
and men whose titles to eminence are secure, seldom worry themselves
about the seditious gossip of old apple-women, and the skylarkings of
funny little boys in the street.
When the substance is gone, men cling to the shadow. Places once set
apart to lofty purposes, still retain the name of that loftiness, even
when converted to the meanest uses. It would seem, as if forced by
imperative Fate to renounce the reality of the romantic and lofty, the
people of the present would fain make a compromise by retaining some
purely imaginative remainder. The curious effects of this tendency is
oftenest evinced in those venerable countries of the old transatlantic
world; where still over the Thames one bridge yet retains the monastic
tide of Blackfriars; though not a single Black Friar, but many a
pickpocket, has stood on that bank since a good ways beyond the days of
Queen Bess; where still innumerable other historic anomalies sweetly and
sadly remind the present man of the wonderful procession that preceded
him in his new generation. Nor--though the comparative recentness of our
own foundation upon these Columbian shores, excludes any considerable
participation in these attractive anomalies,--yet are we not altogether,
in our more elderly towns, wholly without some touch of them, here and
there. It was thus with the ancient Church of the Apostles--better
known, even in its primitive day, under the abbreviative of The
Apostles--which, though now converted from its original purpose to one
so widely contrasting, yet still retained its majestical name. The
lawyer or artist tenanting its chambers, whether in the new building or
the old, when asked where he was to be found, invariably replied,--_At
the Apostles'_. But because now, at last, in the course of the
inevitable transplantations of the more notable localities of the
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