the last block was past the bow, the officer sung out, 'So: steady as she goes on her course;' and came aft as if nothing more than ordinary sailing had been going on. I observed our own little barky nobly following in the American's wake; and, as I afterward learned, she got through it pretty well, though not without much doubt of the propriety of keeping on in such procedure after the 'mad Yankee,' as he was called by our mate."
WHAT BECOMES OF ALL THE PINS?
Every body uses pins – men, women, and children. Every body buys them. Every body bends them, breaks them, knocks off their heads, and loses them. They enter into every operation, from the drawing-room to the scullery. Go where you will, if you look sharp, you may calculate with certainty on picking up a pin – in the streets, in the cabs, on door-steps and mats, in halls and drawing-rooms, sticking in curtains and sofas, and paper-hangings, in counting-houses and lawyers' offices, keeping together old receipts and bills, and fragments of papers, in ladies' needlework, in shopkeepers' parcels, in books, bags, baskets, luggage – they are to be found every where, let them get there how they may, by accident or design. Their ubiquity is astounding – and their manufacture, being in proportion to it, must be something prodigious. There is no article of perpetual use with which we are so familiar; and out of this familiarity springs indifference, for there is no article about whose final destination we are so profoundly ignorant. We know well enough the end of things (not half so useful to us) that wear out in the course of time, or that are liable to be smashed, cracked, chipped, put out of order, or otherwise rendered unavailable for further service; but of the fate of this little article, so universal in its application, so indispensable in its utility, we know nothing whatever. Nobody ever thinks of asking, What becomes of the Pins? For our own parts, we should be very glad to get an answer to that question, and should be very much obliged to any person who could furnish us with it.
The question is by no means an idle one. If we could get at the statistics of pins, we should have some tremendous revelations. The loss in pins, strayed, stolen, and mislaid, is past all calculation. Millions of billions of pins must vanish – no woman alive can tell how or where – in the course of a year. Of the actual number fabricated, pointed, headed, and papered up for sale from one year's end to another (remember they are to be found in every house, large and small, within the pale of civilization), we should be afraid to venture a conjecture; but, judging from what we know of their invincible tendency to lose themselves, and our own inveterate carelessness in losing them, we apprehend that, could such a return be obtained, it would present an alarming result. Think of millions of billions of pins being in course of perpetual disappearance! And that this has been going on for centuries and centuries, and will continue to go on, probably, to the world's end. A grave matter to contemplate, my masters! A pin, in its single integrity, is a trifle, atomic, in comparison with other things that are lost and never found again. But reflect for a moment upon pins in the aggregate. The grand sum-total of human life is made up of trifles – all large bodies are composed of minute particles. Years are made up of months, months of weeks, weeks of days, days of hours, hours of minutes, minutes of seconds; and, coming down to the seconds, and calling in the multiplication-table to enlighten us, we shall find that there are considerably upward of thirty-one millions of them in a year. Try a similar experiment with the pins. Assume any given quantity of loss in any given time, and calculate what it will come to in a cycle of centuries. Most people are afraid of looking into the future, and would not, if they could, acquire a knowledge of the destiny that lies before them. Pause, therefore, before you embark in this fearful calculation; for the chances are largely in favor of your arriving at this harrowing conclusion, that, by the mere force of accumulation and the inevitable pressure of quantity, the great globe itself must, at no very distant period, become a vast shapeless mass of pins.
As yet we have no signs or tokens of this impending catastrophe, and are entirely in the dark about the process that is insidiously conducting us to it; and hence we ask, in solemn accents, What becomes of the Pins? Where do they go to? How do they get there? What are the attractive and repulsive forces to which they are subject after they drop from us? What are the laws that govern their wanderings? Do they dissolve and volatilize, and come back again into the air, so that we are breathing pins without knowing it? Do they melt into the earth, and go to the roots of vegetables, so that every day of our lives we are unconsciously dining on them? The inquiry baffles all scholarship; and we are forced to put up with the obscure satisfaction which Hamlet applies to the world of apparitions, that there are more pins in unknown places and unsuspected shapes upon the earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy.
LAMARTINE ON THE RELIGION OF REVOLUTIONARY MEN
I know – I sigh when I think of it – that hitherto the French people have been the least religious of all the nations of Europe. Is it because the idea of God – which arises from all the evidences of Nature, and from the depths of reflection, being the profoundest and weightiest idea of which human intelligence is capable – and the French mind being the most rapid, but the most superficial, the lightest, the most unreflective of all European races – this mind has not the force and severity necessary to carry far and long the greatest conception of the human understanding?
Is it because our governments have always taken upon themselves to think for us, to believe for us, and to pray for us? Is it because we are and have been a military people, a soldier-nation, led by kings, heroes, ambitious men, from battlefield to battlefield, making conquests, and never keeping them, ravaging, dazzling, charming, and corrupting Europe; and bringing home the manners, vices, bravery, lightness, and impiety of the camp to the fireside of the people?
I know not, but certain it is that the nation has an immense progress to make in serious thought if she wishes to remain free. If we look at the characters, compared as regards religious sentiment, of the great nations of Europe, America, even Asia, the advantage is not for us. The great men of other countries live and die on the scene of history, looking up to heaven; our great men appear to live and die, forgetting completely the only idea for which it is worth living and dying – they live and die looking at the spectator, or, at most, at posterity.
Open the history of America, the history of England, and the history of France; read the great lives, the great deaths, the great martyrdoms, the great words at the hour when the ruling thought of life reveals itself in the last words of the dying – and compare.
Washington and Franklin fought, spoke, suffered, ascended, and descended in their political life of popularity in the ingratitude of glory, in the contempt of their fellow-citizens – always in the name of God, for whom they acted; and the liberator of America died, confiding to God the liberty of the people and his own soul.
Sidney, the young martyr of a patriotism, guilty of nothing but impatience, and who died to expiate his country's dream of liberty, said to his jailer – "I rejoice that I die innocent toward the king, but a victim, resigned to the King on High, to whom all life is due."
The Republicans of Cromwell only sought the way of God, even in the blood of battles. Their politics were their faith – their reign a prayer – their death a psalm. One hears, sees, feels, that God was in all the movements of these great people.
But cross the sea, traverse La Mancha, come to our times, open our annals, and listen to the last words of the great political actors of the drama of our liberty. One would think that God was eclipsed from the soul, that His name was unknown in the language. History will have the air of an atheist, when she recounts to posterity these annihilations, rather than deaths, of celebrated men in the greatest year of France! The victims only have a God; the tribunes and lictors have none.
Look at Mirabeau on the bed of death – "Crown me with flowers," said he; "intoxicate me with perfumes. Let me die to the sound of delicious music" – not a word of God or of his soul. Sensual philosopher, he desired only supreme sensualism, a last voluptuousness in his agony. Contemplate Madame Roland, the strong-hearted woman of the Revolution, on the cart that conveyed her to death. She looked contemptuously on the besotted people who killed their prophets and sibyls. Not
