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It has always seemed to me that the higher one gets, the easier it must be to write; and that, especially at a great elevation, one could strike into lofty themes, and launch out, without fear of shipwreck on any of the earthly headlands, in his aerial voyages.
Oh, it were worth a year of common days to gallop at his right hand, and exult with him when the falcon, from its poise right under the sun, drops itself like an arrow upon its enemy! I have discoursed with him also on themes holy and profane, and given and taken views, and telling him tales in prose and verse, have seen the day go out, then come again.
I slept on board a barge at the wharf that evening, and my dreams ran upon a thousand themes. To every American this was hallowed ground. It had been celebrated by the pencil of Trumbull, the pen of Franklin, and the eloquence of Jefferson.
What more fruitful themes can there be than the rise of the iron, the glass, the oil industry, the steamboat commerce of our interior, the subjection of the Monongahela, the combination of a city which reminds the traveler of Hades, with suburbs which suggest metaphors about Paradise? And can he not find food for inquiry and thought in the great riots of 1877?
The fate of Italy and the Italians, so far as it could be told in the year 1510, has been described with dignity and almost elegiac pathos by Tristan Caracciolo. Applying this general tone of feeling to the humanists themselves, Pierio Valeriano afterwards composed his famous treatise. Some of these themes, such as the fortunes of Leo X, were most suggestive.
And somehow, as they talked, their conversation did gradually drift from passionate personalities into graver themes affecting wider interests, and Aubrey, warming into eloquence, gave free vent to his thoughts and opinions, till noticing that Sylvie sat very silent, looking into the fire somewhat gravely, he checked himself abruptly, fancying that perhaps he was treading on what might be forbidden ground with her whose pleasure was now his law.
What to them was an end I mean all the tricks of counterpoint was to him a means to expression: more expressive music was never dreamed of in a musician's imagination, and at the same time he accomplished with ease part-writing that the most skilful contrapuntists could only perform by labouring long at expressionless, stale old themes first contrived before the Flood to "work well," as the phrase goes.
For, though we have been speaking upon one of the most difficult themes in Christian theology, namely man's creation in holiness and his loss of holiness by the apostasy in Adam, yet we have at the same time been speaking of one of the most humbling, and practically profitable, doctrines in the whole circle of revealed truth.
The building of fortifications; the manufacture of gunpowder; the use of guns and swords; the beauties of rhetoric abounding in the drill manual; the eloquence of batteries and broadsides; the poetry of ditching and draining; the ethics of primary obedience to the authorities, and afterward to God and reason; all that pertains to rapine, bloodshed, and wholesale murder the noble art of mutilating men in the most effective manner, and the best method of cutting them up or putting them together again when that is done; the horrid sin of using one's own lights on any internal problem of right or wrong, religion or public policy, when the emperor, in the plenitude of his generosity, furnishes light enough out of his individual head for sixty-five millions of people these are the principal themes upon which the intellects of the rising generation of Russia are nourished.
Nor must all this be considered in the least irreverent. A certain period is allowed between two particular portions of the mass, when the priest may address his congregation on any public matter: an approaching pattern, or fair, or the like; in which, exhortations to propriety of conduct, or warnings against faction fights, &c., are his themes. Then they only listen in reverence.
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