ANTAEUS THE GIANT. 579 



no goal but the infinite heavens, and no end proposed but the 

 final assumption of the splendors of deity. Shall the words 

 they have uttered, the thoughts they have planted, grow till 

 the earth is filled with life and sweetness, and the harmonious 

 relationship of man to nature, of man to man, and of man 

 to Deity, be no longer the foreshadowing of blessedness for 

 the illuminated spirits of the divine few, but will come to be 

 the common inheritance of the whole race, and health of 

 body, purity of heart and sentiment, and holiness of soul, be 

 the law, as now the exception, and the diseased, vicious, 

 and insane shall no longer cumber the earth ? 



Leaving the inspired ones, the prophets of regeneration, 

 and their dreams of salvation for man, to the coming ages 

 to arrange, what has the present time to say of the present 

 man ? what is the science of the now-existing representative 

 of the venerable "gardener of earth uncorrupted ?" is he 

 plus, minus, or zero ? is he fulfilling the divine economy or 

 playing the devil? At the rapid gait of 2'lf, his ideal of 

 progress, he has rushed into the possession of a beautiful 

 "heritage of woe," in the shape of a catalogue of diseases 

 amounting to several thousand, more or less, among which are 

 greasy and hypertrophied liver, (Dead Sea fruit of whisky and 

 heaven of alcoholic diathesis,) cancerous and ulcerated stom- 

 ach, (cachexy and gluttonous abuse,) effete blood, (result of 

 soggy immobility and laziness,) gouty feet, (celestial harmony 

 of gastronomy,) tuberculated lungs, (horrors of profane gen- 

 eration, bad air, and defective nutrition,) lock-jaw, (general 

 spasmodic clutch of dissolving powers,) and hydrophobia, 

 (commonest affliction of Young America,) not forgetting the 

 benevolent Yankee institutions of the bowie knife, revolver, 

 and "improved American rifle," which, in nosological and 

 etiological tables, belong, of course, to the causes of sudden 

 and violent death. Having arrested him for a moment under 

 the first shade-tree in his "desert of life," and having thor- 

 oughly performed his ablutions by friction with sand, as per 

 recipe of Koran, let us interrogate his present vital connection 

 with the great benevolent cow, Nature, his cherishing mother. 



