... I desist, for not through French can be expressed the thoughts
that surge in me. French is a stale language. So are all the European
languages, one can say in them nothing fresh.... The stalest of them
all is Erse....
Deep down in my heart a sudden voice whispers me that there is only
one land wherein art may reveal herself once more. Of what avail to
await her anywhere else than in Mexico? Only there can the apocalypse
happen. I will take a ticket for Mexico, I will buy a Mexican grammar,
I will be a Mexican.... On a hillside, or beside some grey pool,
gazing out across those plains poor and arid, I will await the first
pale showings of the new dawn....
EUPHEMIA CLASHTHOUGHT[10]
AN IMITATION OF MEREDITH
[Footnote 10: It were not, as a general rule, well to republish after
a man's death the skit you made of his work while he lived. Meredith,
however, was so transcendent that such skits must ever be harmless,
and so lasting will his fame be that they can never lose what
freshness they may have had at first. So I have put this thing in
with the others, making improvements that were needed.--M.B.]
In the heart of insular Cosmos, remote by some scores of leagues of
Hodge-trod arable or pastoral, not more than a snuff-pinch for gaping
tourist nostrils accustomed to inhalation of prairie winds, but enough
for perspective, from those marginal sands, trident-scraped, we are
to fancy, by a helmeted Dame Abstract familiarly profiled on discs
of current bronze--price of a loaf for humbler maws disdainful of
Gallic side-dishes for the titillation of choicer palates--stands
Clashthought Park, a house of some pretension, mentioned at Runnymede,
with the spreading exception of wings given to it in later times
by Daedalean masters not to be baulked of billiards or traps for
Terpsichore, and owned for unbroken generations by a healthy line
of procreant Clashthoughts, to the undoing of collateral branches
eager for the birth of a female.
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