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By Root 16807 0

Æsthetical, or what not — we know little, and, upon our honor, we wish to know less. Occupied, Laputically, in their great work of a progress that never progresses, we take it for granted, also, that they care as little about ours. But whatever the opinions of these people may be — however portentous the “IDEA “ which they have been so long threatening to “evolve” — we still think it clear that they take a very roundabout way of evolving it. The use of Language is in the promulgation of Thought. If a man — if an Orphicist — or a SEER — or whatever else he may choose to call himself, while the rest of the world calls him an ass — if this gentleman have an idea which he does not understand himself, the best thing he can do is to say nothing about it; for, of course, he can entertain no hope that what he, the SEER, cannot comprehend, should be comprehended by the mass of common humanity; but if he have an idea which ­is actually intelligible to himself, and if he sincerely wish to render it intelligible to others, we then hold it as indisputable that he should employ those forms of speech which are the best adapted to further his object. He should speak to the people in that people’s ordinary tongue. He should arrange words, such as are habitually employed for the several preliminary and introductory ideas to be conveyed he should arrange them in collocations such as those in which we are accustomed to see those words arranged.

But to all this the Orphicist thus replies: “I am a SEER. My IDEA — the idea which by Providence I am especially commissioned to evolve — is one so vast — so novel — that ordinary words, in ordinary collocations, will be insufficient for its comfortable evolution.” Very true. We grant the vastness of the Idea — it is manifested in the sucking of the thumb — but, then, if ordinary language be insufficient — the ordinary language which men understand — à fortiori will be insufficient that inordinate language which no man has ever understood, and which any well-educated baboon would blush in being accused of understanding. The “Seer,” therefore, has no resource but to oblige mankind by holding his tongue, and suffering his Idea to remain quietly “unevolved,” until some Mesmeric mode of intercommunication shall be invented, whereby the antipodal brains of the Seer and of the man of Common Sense shall be brought into the necessary rapport. Meantime we earnestly ask if bread-and-butter be the vast Idea in question — if bread-and-butter be any portion of this vast Idea; for we have often observed that when a Seer has to speak of even so usual a thing as bread-and-butter, he can never be induced to mention it outright. He will, if you choose, say any thing and every thing but bread-and-butter. He will consent to hint at buckwheat cake. He may even accommodate you so far as to insinuate oatmeal porridge — but, if bread-and-butter be really the matter intended, we never yet met the Orphicist who could get out the three individual words “bread-and-butter.”

We have already said that “Gregory the Seventh” was, unhappily, infected with the customary cant of the day — the cant of the muddle-pates who dishonor a profound and ennobling philosophy by styling themselves transcendentalists. In fact, there are few highly sensitive or imaginative intellects for which ­the vortex of mysticism, in any shape, has not an almost irresistible influence, on account of the shadowy confines which separate the Unknown from the Sublime. Mr. Horne, then, is, in some measure, infected. The success of his previous works had led him to attempt, zealously, the production of a poem which should be worthy his high powers. We have no doubt that he revolved carefully in mind a variety of august conceptions, and from these thoughtfully selected what his judgment, rather than what his impulses, designated as the noblest and the best. In a word, he has weakly yielded his own poetic sentiment of the poetic — yielded it, in some degree, to the pertinacious opinion, and talk, of a certain junto by which he is surrounded — a junto of dreamers whose