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Then, for two or three years I have not been able to visit some islands whose language I know just enough of to see that they supply a valuable link in the great Polynesian chain. One might almost get together all the disjecta membra and reconstruct the original Polynesian tongue. But chiefly, of course, my information about Melanesia may be interesting.
Strewn about were small fish, the disjecta membra of many kinds of animal, ships' masts and anchors, human bones, and merchandise; in the centre was land with hillocks upon it, the alluvial deposit, I supposed, from what the whale swallowed. This was wooded with trees of all kinds, and vegetables were growing with all the appearance of cultivation. The coast might have measured thirty miles round.
Now we are in the Piazza del Popolo, and having glanced a moment at those buxom goddesses, at the foot of the Pincian hill, who look right well this morning in their flowing robes, turn out of the Popolo Gate, just as a large drove of lean turkeys, driven in from the Campagna, besiege the entrance on their way to the bird-market, where they are to be presently slaughtered, drawn, and quartered; their "disjecta membra" exposed to sale at so many baiocchi a pound; and their blood, which is more esteemed than their flesh, hawked about the streets in cakes: of course we are too humane to hint to them their coming destiny.
The prophet's part was to prophesy to the bones first; and his word, in a sense, brought about the effect which it foretold, since his ministry was the most potent means of rekindling dying hopes, and bringing the disjecta membra of the nation together again.
All this ought certainly to unmake the author in question, and strew his disjecta membra wide over the realm of oblivion. But this is not really the effect.
Disjecta membra are all that we find of any Poet, or of any man. Whoever looks intelligently at this Shakspeare may recognize that he too was a Prophet, in his way; of an insight analogous to the Prophetic, though he took it up in another strain. Nature seemed to this man also divine; unspeakable, deep as Tophet, high as Heaven; "We are such stuff as Dreams are made of!"
There were bigger boys, bolder still, to whom this vegetation, or something kindred that escapes me, yielded long black beanlike slips which they lighted and smoked, the smaller ones staring and impressed; I at any rate think of the small one I can best speak for as constantly wading through an Indian summer of these disjecta, fascinated by the leaf-kicking process, the joy of lonely trudges, over a course in which those parts and the slightly more northward pleasantly confound themselves.
The book does not deserve even to be read, which does not impose on us the duty of frequent pauses, much reflecting and inward debate, or require that we should often go back, compare one observation and statement with another, and does not call upon us to combine and knit together the disjecta membra.
It resembled a reversed pyramid, in danger of being crushed by its own weight. "If Silesia were but ours again! As for Naples and Alsatia, they were never more than disjecta membra of our empire; and they were always less profit than trouble. But Silesia is ours ours by a common ancestry, a common language, and the strong tie of affection.
Such a base was lost when Caesar conquered Gaul; then some substitute for Gaul had to be found. It was Greece and the East; where, as you may say, abjects and orts of truth came down; not the live Mysteries, but the membra disjecta of the vanished Mysteries of a vanished age. With these the Teachers of the Roman world had to work, distilling out of them what they might of the ancient Theosophy.
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