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- 13299
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- 2026-01-30T20:48:52.924Z
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- start_line
- 13250
- text
- think that by starving thy body, thou shalt fatten thy soul! Is yonder
ox fatted because yonder lean fox starves in the winter wood? And prate
not of despising thy body, while still thou flourisheth thy flesh-brush!
The finest houses are most cared for within; the outer walls are freely
left to the dust and the soot. Put venison in thee, and so wit shall
come out of thee. It is one thing in the mill, but another in the sack.
Now it was the continual, quadrangular example of those forlorn fellows,
the Apostles, who, in this period of his half-developments and
transitions, had deluded Pierre into the Flesh-Brush Philosophy, and had
almost tempted him into the Apple-Parings Dialectics. For all the long
wards, corridors, and multitudinous chambers of the Apostles' were
scattered with the stems of apples, the stones of prunes, and the shells
of peanuts. They went about huskily muttering the Kantian Categories
through teeth and lips dry and dusty as any miller's, with the crumbs of
Graham crackers. A tumbler of cold water was the utmost welcome to their
reception rooms; at the grand supposed Sanhedrim presided over by one of
the deputies of Plotinus Plinlimmon, a huge jug of Adam's Ale, and a
bushel-basket of Graham crackers were the only convivials. Continually
bits of cheese were dropping from their pockets, and old shiny apple
parchments were ignorantly exhibited every time they drew out a
manuscript to read you. Some were curious in the vintages of waters; and
in three glass decanters set before you, Fairmount, Croton, and
Cochituate; they held that Croton was the most potent, Fairmount a
gentle tonic, and Cochituate the mildest and least inebriating of all.
Take some more of the Croton, my dear sir! Be brisk with the Fairmount!
Why stops that Cochituate? So on their philosophical tables went round
their Port, their Sherry, and their Claret.
Some, further advanced, rejected mere water in the bath, as altogether
too coarse an element; and so, took to the Vapor-baths, and steamed
their lean ribs every morning. The smoke which issued from their heads,
and overspread their pages, was prefigured in the mists that issued from
under their door-sills and out of their windows. Some could not sit down
of a morning until after first applying the Vapor-bath outside and then
thoroughly rinsing out their interiors with five cups of cold Croton.
They were as faithfully replenished fire-buckets; and could they,
standing in one cordon, have consecutively pumped themselves into each
other, then the great fire of 1835 had been far less wide-spread and
disastrous.
Ah! ye poor lean ones! ye wretched Soakites and Vaporites! have not your
niggardly fortunes enough rinsed ye out, and wizened ye, but ye must
still be dragging the hose-pipe, and throwing still more cold Croton on
yourselves and the world? Ah! attach the screw of your hose-pipe to some
fine old butt of Madeira! pump us some sparkling wine into the world!
see, see, already, from all eternity, two-thirds of it have lain
helplessly soaking!
- title
- Chunk 5