Page:Pierre.djvu/379

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PIERRE, AS A JUVENILE AUTHOR
365

all ambiguities, all transcendentals, and all manner of juggling. Now some imaginatively heterodoxical men are often surprisingly twitted upon their wilful inverting of all common-sense notions, their absurd and all-displacing transcendentals, which say three is four, and two and two make ten. But if the eminent Juggularius himself ever advocated in mere words a doctrine one thousandth part so ridiculous and subversive of all practical sense, as that doctrine which the world actually and eternally practises, of giving unto him who already hath more than enough, still more of the superfluous article, and taking away from him who hath nothing at all, even that which he hath,—then is the truest book in the world a lie.

Wherefore we see that the so-called Transcendentalists are not the only people who deal in transcendentals. On the contrary, we seem to see that the Utilitarians,—the everyday world's people themselves, far transcend those inferior Transcendentalists by their own incomprehensible worldly maxims. And—what is vastly more—with the one party, their transcendentals are but theoretic and inactive, and therefore harmless; whereas with the other, they are actually clothed in living deeds.

The highly gravelling doctrine and practice of the world, above cited, had in some small degree been manifested in the case of Pierre. He prospectively possessed the fee of several hundred farms scattered over part of two adjoining counties; and now the proprietor of that popular periodical, the Gazelle Magazine, sent him several additional dollars for his sonnets. That proprietor (though in sooth he never read the sonnets, but referred them to his professional adviser; and was so ignorant, that, for a long time previous to the periodical's actually being started, he insisted upon spelling the Gazelle with a g for the z, as thus: Gagelle; maintaining, that in the