‘elegant diction,’ yet with voice audible enough to whoso hath ears, up there on the gravelly side-hills, or down on the splashy, indiarubber-like salt-marshes of native Jaalam.  To this soul also the Necessity of Creating somewhat has unveiled its awful front.  If not Oedipuses and Electras and Alcestises, then in God’s name Birdofredum Sawins!  These also shall get born into the world, and filch (if so need) a Zingali subsistence therein, these lank, omnivorous Yankees of his.  He shall paint the Seen, since the Unseen will not sit to him.  Yet in him also are Nibelungen-lays, and Iliads, and Ulysses-wanderings, and Divine Comedies,—­if only once he could come at them!  Therein lies much, nay all; for what truly is this which we name All, but that which we do not possess?...  Glimpses also are given us of an old father Ezekiel, not without paternal pride, as is the wont of such.  A brown, parchment-hided old man of the geoponic or bucolic species, gray-eyed, we fancy, queued perhaps, with much weather-cunning and plentiful September-gale memories, bidding fair in good time to become the Oldest Inhabitant.  After such hasty apparition, he vanishes and is seen no more....  Of ’Rev. Homer Wilbur, A.M., Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam,’ we have small care to speak here.  Spare touch in him of his Melesigenes namesake, save, haply, the—­blindness!  A tolerably caliginose, nephelegeretous elderly gentleman, with infinite faculty of sermonizing, muscularized by long practice and excellent digestive apparatus, and, for the rest, well-meaning enough, and with small private illuminations (somewhat tallowy, it is to be feared) of his own.  To him, there, ‘Pastor of the First Church in Jaalam,’ our Hosea presents himself as a quite inexplicable Sphinx-riddle.  A rich poverty of Latin and Greek,—­so far is clear enough, even to eyes peering myopic through horn-lensed editorial spectacles,—­but naught farther?  O purblind, well-meaning, altogether fuscous Melesigenes-Wilbur, there are things in him incommunicable by stroke of birch!  Did it ever enter that old bewildered head of thine that there was the Possibility of the Infinite in him?  To thee, quite wingless (and even featherless) biped, has not so much even as a dream of wings ever come?  ’Talented young parishioner’?  Among the Arts whereof thou art Magister, does that of seeing happen to be one?  Unhappy Artium Magister! Somehow a Nemean lion, fulvous, torrid-eyed, dry-nursed in broad-howling sand-wildernesses of a sufficiently rare spirit-Libya (it may be supposed) has got whelped among the sheep.  Already he stands wild-glaring, with feet clutching the ground as with oak-roots, gathering for a Remus-spring over the walls of thy little fold.  In heaven’s name, go not near him with that flybite crook of thine!  In good time, thou painful preacher, thou wilt go to the appointed place of departed Artillery-Election Sermons, Right-hands of Fellowship, and Results of Councils, gathered to thy spiritual fathers with much Latin of the Epitaphial sort; thou too, shalt have thy reward; but on him the Eumenides have looked, not Xantippes of the pit, snake-tressed, finger-threatening, but radiantly calm as on antique gems; for him paws impatient the winged courser of the gods, champing unwelcome bit; him the starry deeps, the empyrean glooms, and far-flashing splendors await.