we discover how to light our cigarettes with our personal magnetism, or perhaps stop smoking altogether, such a contrivance will naturally—assume an interest for curious collectors and thereby become automatically as diverting an object for a cabinet as a Japanese scent-bottle or a specimen of Capo di Monte porcelain. The Baron de Meyer has found it amusing to decorate rooms with Victorian atrocities, such as baskets of shells and antimacassars, the sort of thing that went with black-walnut whatnots, knitted fire-screens, and Rogers groups in the days, not so long ago, when Godey's Lady's Book reposed on the centre table near the family Bible.
In his essay on The Poet, Ralph Waldo Emerson found occasion to remark: "We have yet had no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of our incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer; then in the Middle Age; then in Calvinism. Banks and tariffs, the newspaper and caucus, Methodism and Unitarianism, are flat and dull to dull people, but rest on the same foundations of wonder as the town of Troy and the temple of Delphi, and are as swiftly passing away." The poet, the novelist, in America, since Emerson's time, are at last aware of the
