No More Learning

Speech is silver: silence is golden. No utterance more Orphic than this.
While, therefore, as highest author, we reverence him whose works
continue heroically unwritten, we have also our hopeful word for those
who with pen (from wing of goose loud-cackling, or seraph
God-commissioned) record the thing that is revealed. . . . Under mask of
quaintest irony, we detect here the deep, storm-tost (nigh ship-wracked)
soul, thunder-scarred, semi-articulate, but ever climbing hopefully
toward the peaceful summits of an Infinite Sorrow. . . . Yes, thou poor,
forlorn Hosea, with Hebrew fire-flaming soul in thee, for thee also this
life of ours has not been without its aspects of heavenliest pity and
laughingest mirth. Conceivable enough! Through coarse Thersites-cloak,
we have revelation of the heart, wild-glowing, world-clasping, that is
in him. Bravely he grapples with the life-problem as it presents itself
to him, uncombed, shaggy, careless of the 'nicer proprieties,' inexpert
of 'elegant diction,' yet with voice audible enough to whoso hath ears,
up there on the gravelly side-hills, or down on the splashy,
indiarubber-like salt-marshes of native Jaalam. To this soul also the
_Necessity of Creating_ somewhat has unveiled its awful front.
If not
Oedipuses and Electras and Alcestises, then in God's name Birdofredum
Sawins! These also shall get born into the world, and filch (if so need)
a Zingali subsistence therein, these lank, omnivorous Yankees of his. He
shall paint the Seen, since the Unseen will not sit to him. Yet in him
also are Nibelungen-lays, and Iliads, and Ulysses-wanderings, and Divine
Comedies,--if only once he could come at them! Therein lies much, nay
all; for what truly is this which we name _All_, but that which we do
_not_ possess? . . . Glimpses also are given us of an old father Ezekiel,
not without paternal pride, as is the wont of such. A brown,
parchment-hided old man of the geoponic or bucolic species, gray-eyed,
we fancy, _queued_ perhaps, with much weather-cunning and plentiful
September-gale memories, bidding fair in good time to become the Oldest
Inhabitant. After such hasty apparition, he vanishes and is seen no
more. . . . Of 'Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.