The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866

The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17,
No. 103,
by Various

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17,
No. 103,
May, 1866, by Various This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere
at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it,
give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg
License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 17, No. 103, May, 1866
Author: Various
Release Date: June 22, 2007 [EBook #21902]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY ***

Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, Josephine Paolucci and the Online
Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net. (This file was
produced from images generously made available by Cornell
University Digital Collections).

THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics.
VOL. XVII.--MAY, 1866.--NO. CIII.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1866, by TICKNOR
AND FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District
of Massachusetts.
Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes
moved to the end of the article.

THE HARMONISTS.
My brother Josiah I call a successful man,--very successful, though
only an attorney in a manufacturing town. But he fixed his goal, and
reached it. He belongs to the ruling class,--men with slow, measuring
eyes and bull-dog jaws,--men who know their own capacity to an
atom's weight, and who go through life with moderate, inflexible,
unrepenting steps. He looks askance at me when I cross his path; he is
in the great market making his way: I learned long ago that there was
no place there for me. Yet I like to look in, out of the odd little corner
into which I have been shoved,--to look in at the great play, never
beginning and never ending, of bargain and sale, for which all the
world's but a stage; to see how men like my brother have been busy,
since God blessed all things he had made, in dragging them down to the
trade level, and stamping price-marks on them. Josiah looks at me
grimly, as I said. Jog as methodically as I will from desk to bed and
back to desk again, he suspects some outlaw blood under the gray head
of the fagged-out old clerk. He indulges in his pictures, his bronzes: I
have my high office-stool, and bedroom in the fifth story of a cheap
hotel. Yet he suspects me of having forced a way out of the actual
common-sense world by sheer force of whims and vagaries, and to
have pre-empted a homestead for myself in some dream-land, where

neither he nor the tax-gatherer can enter.
"It won't do," he said to-day, when I was there (for I use his books now
and then). "Old Père Bonhours, you're poring over? Put it down, and
come take some clam soup. Much those fellows knew about life!
Zachary! Zachary! you have kept company with shadows these forty
years, until you have grown peaked and gaunt yourself. When will you
go to work and be a live man?"
I knew we were going to have the daily drill which Josiah gave to his
ideas; so I rolled the book up to take with me, while he rubbed his
spectacles angrily, and went on.
"I tell you, the world's a great property-exchanging machine, where
everything has its weight and value; a great, inexorable machine,--and
whoever tries to shirk his work in it will be crushed! Crushed! Think of
your old friend Knowles!"
I began to hurry on my old overcoat; I never had but two or three
friends, and I could not hear their names from Josiah's mouth. But he
was not quick to see when he had hurt people.
"Why, the poet,"--more sententious than before,--"the poet sells his
song; he knows that the airiest visions must resolve into trade-laws.
You cannot escape from them. I see your wrinkled old face, red as a
boy's, over the newspapers sometimes. There was the daring of that
Rebel Jackson, Frémont's proclamation, Shaw's death; you claimed
those things as heroic, prophetic. They were mere facts tending to solve
the great problem of Capital vs. Labor. There was one work for which
the breath was put into our nostrils,--to grow, and make the world grow
by giving and taking. Give and take; and the wisest man gives the least
and gains the most."
I left him as soon as I could escape. I respect Josiah: his advice would
be invaluable to any man; but I am content that we should live
apart,--quite content. I went down to Yorke's for my solitary chop. The
old prophet Solomon somewhere talks of the conies or ants as "a feeble
folk who prepare their meat