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As a matter of fact were not many writers and reformers unconsciously in league with the procurer, in that they treated vice and profligacy as something, at bottom, charming? He himself had seen none of this vague charm. "For me," he reflected, "there have been no Francois Villons or Sapphos in the tenderloins of American cities.
And now, my young friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star, all that love too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before, go with the Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric "most beauteous princesses!"
Even society, in its most artificial state, consents to this arrangement. These factory girls from Lowell shall mate themselves with the pride of drawing-rooms and literary circles, the bluebells in fashion's nosegay, the Sapphos, and Montagues, and Nortons of the age. Other modes of intellect bring together as strange companies.
But then, the West has never, I imagine, produced a figure comparable to her Li Pos, Tu Fus, Po Chu-is or Ssu-k'ung T'us: giants in lyricism one might name a hundred of them beside whom our Hugos and Sapphos and Keatses were pygmies.
A great variety of small Sapphos must turn seamstresses*, at three-halfpence a shirt instead of a penny a line; while the minor poets will have to earn a livelihood by writing invoice, instead of in verse. But this transposition of talent, and transition of gain, is no more than arose from the substitution of railroads for turnpike roads.
The proportions of these buildings are in good taste; the chaste cold moon clothes them in grace and beauty; and for the material, what matters it, when, by her light, painted pine may be fancied Parian marble! The cliff itself is a very Leucadia, and as well fitted for a leap as love-sick heart could seek: but there are no Sapphos now-a-days; the head of Nahant is likely to remain un-be-rhymed.
Hortense de Vere, queen of the air, when that sylph-like lady came out into the arena of Forepaugh's great circus-tent last evening, and poised herself upon one tiny toe on the back of an untamed and foaming Arabian barb that dashed round and round the sawdust ring. Talk about your Sapphos and your poetry! Would Chicago hesitate a moment in choosing between Sappho and Mdlle.
The truth that, as the first primitive human males and females, unable to count farther than their fingers, or grasp an abstract idea, or feel the controlling power of social emotion, could only develop into the Sapphos, Aristotles, and Shelleys of a more expanded civilisation, if side by side, and line by line, male and female forms have expanded together; if, as the convolutions of his brain increased in complexity, so increased the convolutions in hers; if, as her forehead grew higher, so developed his; and that, if the long upward march of the future is ever to be accomplished by the race, male and female must march side by side, acting and reacting on each other through inheritance; or progress is impossible.
And so by Parisian man I mean, not the chorus men of Des Italiens, betalcumed and odoriferous with the scents of Pinaud, those weird birds who are guarded by the casual Yankee as typical and symbolic of the nation. Nor do I mean the fish-named, liver-faced denizens of the region down from the Opéra, those spaniel-eyed creatures who live in the tracks of petite Sapphos, who spend the days in cigarette smoke, the nights in scheming ambuscade. Nor yet the Austrian cross-breeds who are to be beheld behind the gulasch in the Rue d'Hauteville, nor the semi-Milanese who sibilate the minestrone at Aldegani's in the Passage des Panoramas, nor the Frenchified Spaniards and Portuguese who gobble the guisillo madrileño at Don José's in the Rue Helder, nor the half-French Cossacks amid the potrokha in the Restaurant Cubat, nor the Orientals with the waxed moustachios and girlish waists who may be observed at moontide dawdling over their café
And now, my young friends, in the year 1822, in which I write, and shall probably die, the love which glitters through Moore, and walks so ambitiously ambiguous through the verse of Byron; the love which you consider now so deep and so true; the love which tingles through the hearts of your young ladies, and sets you young gentlemen gazing on the evening star, all that love too will become unfamiliar or ridiculous to an after age; and the young aspirings and the moonlight dreams and the vague fiddle-de-dees which ye now think so touching and so sublime will go, my dear boys, where Cowley's Mistress and Waller's Sacharissa have gone before, go with the Sapphos and the Chloes, the elegant "charming fairs," and the chivalric "most beauteous princesses!"
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