ox. 307 



the work ox, sacrificing his life for food and luxury, as in the 

 fatted beef, or yielding daily tribute from the secretions of the 

 blood in the shape of milk and cream, in the gentle, benefi- 

 cent, and motherly cow, this great ruminant would appear 



results. A genius, a rage, a transcendent specialty of force in one 

 sphere, is absolutely necessary. The thing must be born in a man. 

 And then, is it not strange to reflect how rarely the great power is 

 revealed, and how long the heavenly gift may remain without being 

 discovered, even by the possessor himself? It would seem that the 

 genius of occasion is also required to rouse the soul to recognition of 

 itself. Poets have heard the echoes of the magic lyre, and been in- 

 spired even in old age to sing immortal songs ; painters have caught 

 the enchanting sheen, blind to its power through life, and touched 

 the canvas with undying beauty ; and orators, whose youth had 

 passed in silence, have startled a listening world with their elo- 

 quence. So on the banks of the Kiskimineas, a foreordained fisher- 

 man, who had never baited a hook or felt the nibble of a chub in all 

 his life, was startled, at the age of eighty, into the discovery that he 

 was a natural-born Waltonian priest, anointed from the beginning of 

 all things, and with religious awe assumed the solemn functions of 

 his calling, but died with the raptures of catching pike within sixty 

 days of his ordination. Thus, also, was it that an ancient physician 

 of the Alleghany Mountain, at an advanced age, accidentally dis- 

 covered that his person was the residence of a beautiful but terrible 

 demon, that he was in fact a poetically inspired, an enthusiastically 

 inebriated ox driver. This strange passion, this wonderful power 

 in a particular drift, had remained hidden deep down in the un- 

 developed elements of his consciousness for long years, when a 

 bright casualty revealed the faculty divine, and astonished himself 

 and the world. Necessity, (maternal authoress of many things!) on 

 an occasion, directed his attention to the subjugation (under-the- 

 yoking) of two tremendous bulls. That accomplished, two others 

 were added, and yet two others, until, grandly culminating, a team of 

 eight horned monsters, dragging enormous logs, were guided with 

 dexterity and ease through the labyrinths of an intricate forest. 

 Thus, apparently accidental, his illumination came, and he discovered 

 that an imperfectly developed country doctor, (who had committed 

 violence against his organization bybeating the bars of his limita- 

 tions in false directions, through a subversive torture, called regular 

 education,} had been forced out of the mournful ruin of perverted 

 elements of an original primordial king, whose indefeasible sceptre 

 was the ox gad. 



