16 REV. JONES VERY, IN MEMOEIAM ; 



rial through that. "What a protest is such a nature as 

 Very's against all this ! 



Everything is clone to order here. Mankind are turned 

 out themselves, million-peopled cities and soldiers' monu- 

 ments out of hand. Briefness is our eternity and antiq- 

 uity. We want a short cut to heaven itself. We shall 

 breathe by machinery at last and travel by lightning, no 

 time to think, stock-quotations will be our poetry. The 

 future lies between three people, the Chinaman, Jew 

 and Yankee. I think the Jew will be the last man and 

 that his nose will be projected on Jupiter. 



One day some rich man will buy out the Vatican, and 

 the Pyramids, perhaps the Pope himself, and bring them 

 over here, and they will be lost on the way. A woman 

 offered to buy the Arc de Triomphe the other day, which if 

 not true is ben trovato. We delight in bigness. Our 

 minds are figures and might be set down in a ledger to- 

 morrow. The countenance is commercial, shrewdness 

 ground in, no openness, expression screwed into a cold 

 sharpness, knit, concentrated, eyes like gimlets, a shut 

 thin mouth, strait lips, an air like nails driven into you 

 or files drawn over your nose, money eaten, digested 

 and cropping out, no sensibilit} r permitted or fraternity, 

 still less sentiment, a living on the points of a carding 

 machine, no craving for sympathy, self-sufficing, and yet 

 with this terrible arraignment the best natured and most 

 generous man in the world, too easy natured to be good. 

 Coming from Europe we seem like dried specimens pre- 

 pared for an herbarium, in summer especially, with 

 dusters on and banged-in hats. The revulsion is painful 

 from the easy European who enjoys life with all his 

 cramped opportunity. 



Where our scant population is, there will be another 

 Europe with many capitals and emulation and variety of 



