Part 6 (1/2)
”What does the gentleman mean?” asked the servant of Mr. Pope.
”He wants to know if Squire Foster is at home.”
”Yes, sir, he is. Will you walk in?”
Mr. Hill and his friend were showed into the parlour, where they waited the coming of the Squire. After a brief interval ”the resident proprietor” made his appearance.
”Ah, ah! how do you do, Mr. Hill? I am very glad to see you,” said the Squire, at the same time shaking him by the hand.
”I am in the highest state of excellent health, extremely obliged, Squire. I am sanguine to hope, sir, that you live in the felicity of enjoying, and possessing, and feeling an undistracted state of the physical const.i.tution. Will you, Squire, give me the pleasure and allow me the happiness of introducing and bringing to your acquaintance my friend Mr. Pope? Squire Foster,--Mr. Pope.”
”How did you leave Mrs. Hill and family?” asked the Squire.
”It gives me no ordinary pain, and no usual grief, and no common sorrow, to inform and instruct you that I left Mrs. Hill, my dear wife, my choice companion, subject to, and suffering from, and enduring under, a severe and trying affectation of her respiratory organs, superinduced by an exaggerant cold, received, and taken, and caught by her the other day of last week, when we were travelling, and riding, and going to the village of Burnley. My little ones, my children, my offspring, Squire, I am excussitated to say, are in the finest, the best, the happiest state of their juvenile physique that I have ever known, remembered, and borne in mind.”
”How is your son John, the little fellow with whom I was so much pleased when I was at your house last?” enquired Squire Foster.
”He is a unique adolescent--a heavenly cherub. His excessively prodigious development of juvenile intellectual and religious numerous tendencies produce within me the largest, the greatest, the richest exquisite emotions of deep pleasurability, and profoundest sensations of unparalleled wonderment.”
”You are very eloquent this morning,” said the Squire, rather sarcastically.
Mr. Hill, considering himself a little flattered by this encomium, said, ”My eloquence, sir, is the natural, the habitual, the spontaneous, the unprompted infusions of my own individuality of mental hallucinations, sparkling out in the scintillations which you do me the honour of denominating, and calling, and epithetising as eloquence.”
Mr. Hill was something of a transcendentalist in his way. The Squire was aware of his tendency in this direction, and not having a distinct idea of what his transcendentalism was, he ventured to ask him during the conversation to give him a definition of it. After a brief pause, as though Mr. Hill was meditating for a succinct and clear definition, he said,--
”I would define transcendentalism as the spiritual cognoscence of psychological irrefragability, connected with concuitant ademption of encolumnient spirituality, and etherealized contention of subsultory concretion.”
”That _is_ transcendentalism, indeed!” exclaimed the Squire. ”It goes beyond my understanding and comprehension.”
”I feel myself in the same predicament,” observed Mr. Pope, who up to this time had been silent during the desultory conversation of the Squire and Mr. Hill.
”From what stand-point (as the Germans would call it) do you gain that view of transcendentalism?” asked Mr. Pope.
”I have gained it from the esoteric stand-point of Christian exegetical a.n.a.lysis; and agglutinating the polsynthetical ectoblasts of h.o.m.ogeneous asceticism, I perceive at once the absolute individuality of this definition.”
”That is perfectly satisfactory,” said Mr. Pope, with a look and in a tone of keen irony.
I will not detain the reader any longer with specimens of the Pleonast in the person of Mr. Hill; but give a few others of a desultory character, with which I have met in reading and otherwise.
A certain gentleman was once speaking to a few friends on the subject of happiness, and in giving his experience as to where it could not be found, he is said have spoken thus,--
”I sought for happiness where it could not be found; I looked for felicity where it could not be discovered; I enquired after bliss in those places, situations, and circ.u.mstances which neither bliss, nor felicity, nor happiness ever visited. Thus it remained with little change, and continued without much alteration, all through the days of my youth, the years of my juvenility, and the period of my adolescence.”
”Is that really your experience?” said one who was listening; ”and do you intend that as a caution to us against seeking happiness in the same way?”
”Most positively and a.s.suredly I do. Profoundly impressed with the veracity of these sentiments, deeply sensible of their correctness, and heartily persuaded, and a.s.sured, and convinced of their consonance with truth, I urge and press upon your attention what I have above and before couched and expressed in such simple, and plain, and intelligible language, and language easily to be understood withal.”
A Pleonast, once speaking of a man who was found drowned in a ca.n.a.l in the neighbourhood where he lived, said,--
”He is supposed to have perpetrated, committed, and done, voluntary, willing, and of himself, destruction, suicide, and drowning, while in a mood of mental aberration, superinduced, brought about, and effected, by long indulgence in and continued habits of inhaling, drinking, and swallowing, to inebriation and drunkenness, intoxicating liquids.”