Delaware gazette and state journal. (Wilmington, Del.) 1883-1902, 1885-11-19
onnIsrm4s axD rnAsxsoIrINa,
Joy In This world and Hope OF IL
I'm AnOfher.


Joy In This world and Hope OF It
in Another.
In Harper's Magazine for December
George William Curtis says Like a
voyager coasting along the continent by
day, to whom, as one headland is rounded,
another appears, and by night, as one
light is passed, another ''little candle
throws its beams" across the dark waters,
so, circling the year, as the flowers leave
us, the fruits appear, and as the summer
holidays vanish, Christmas begins TO rise,
the noblest festival of all. As He whom
il commentaries cheered the shrinking
spirit and gathering shadow of declining
life with the promise of brighter day,
so prospective Christmas with its high
blazing fires and generous goodwill, con-
sumes the melancholy of autumn; ond
the Indian summer, which closes with
tranquil warmth and tenderly luminous
air the pageant of the year, may we'll
seem the promise and dawn of that most
happy season which itself forecasts celes-
tial Joys.
The word to describe Christmas is the
word cheerful, In its strictest, fullest
and most generous sense it is cheerful
Christmas. 1t is the day of good cheer
for soul and body, and the delights OF
good living upon this happy day merely
symbolic the spiritual Joy which attends
it. Consequently it is not the ascetic
nor the pietist who most truly appre-
ciates it, but the man who as fully enjoys
this world as he reyerently hopes to enjoy
better.
The irresistible tendency to cheerful
ness which was suppressed by the laws
of the English Puritan commonwealth
against Christmas burst out again in the
New England Thanksgiving. This was
Puritan Christmas, nm autumunl Christ
mas, and in New England it has gathered
around itself much of the traditional OBJ
servance of the older day.
There is n sly stroke Of humor in
Edmund Quincy's capital sketch of ian
octogenary fifty years SINCE" which rep
resents Thanksgiving MS conqueror, the
junior feast-day bearing off the sayory
spoils of the elder branch. A young un-
dcr-graduate ut Harvard, not long after
the revolution, pays II visit of duty 10
venerable friend of the family at some
distance from Boston, and there eats his
dinner. The Astounding
banquet is described with The gusto OF an
msthetic gourmet and after the preposter-
ous excess Of tnutog and roast turkey and
beef Ii mode and boiled chickens
"oystered, and jellied venison and Wild
ducks and partridges and lesser game had
paid due tribute and pissed along,
Mt last "the table is cleared, and
anxious expectation sits impatient
on every brow. pause ensues. The
door opens, and 10! he comes, the pud-
ding of the plum Thanksgiving Days
chief. He comes attended,
conqueror-like, by the dethroned monarch
of Christmas Day, mince pie, who fol-
lows crestfallen in his triumphal train.
Apple pie, too, rears his honest, soncy
face, in sturdy yeoman pride. Custard,
no longer 'blasphemed through the nose,
receives the resp, ctful Difference due to
fallen greatness. And thou, pumpkin pie,
my country's boast, when | forget thee,
may my right hand forget its cunning |!
And squash pie, too, when l refuse to
celebrate Thy praise, may my tongue
cleave to the roof Of my mouth"
This eulogy of dainty dishes might be
Choctaw to Brillat-Savarin, and Ude
might stare at the barbaric menu. But
the passage shows how in the mind of II
New England humorist Thanksgiving may
have appropriated the honors of Christ
mas, which TO him, scholar and gentle
man, is apparently ITO more than King
james the Pretender to Captain John Gil
pin of the Georgian era. With fine au
dacity or absolving innocence our author
blithely lays hands upon the very symbol
of old Christmas, the Pudding of the
Plum, and gravely and with an absolute
air of indisputability, as if announcing an
axiom of mathematics, declares it to
be Thanksgiving Days acknowledged
chief" What delightful arrangement
of epitaphs and whimsical confusion OF
idens This humorous iconoclast might
rs well have robbed Michaelmas of It's
goose and given il to Martinnias, or be-
slowed the pancakes OF Shrove-1uesday
upon the modest Ember- days, or garlanded
the eve of st. Sylvester with Easter-eggs,
or celebrated gracious Whitsuntide with
hotcross-buns,a as have stripped Christmas
of its peculiar and distinctive gustatory
delight and bestowed it upon any other
day, even were it so meritorious as
Thanksgiving.
How ready, nevertheless, Edmund
Quincy would have been to maintain his
thesis, and how dexterously he would
have done it He would willingly have
nailed it upon any dining-room door, and
detied all comers. He had always a
reason for his faith, and in debates of
this dainty kind his CULVER of facts WINS
full. A charming bonhomie, certain
tenderness of feeling, racy vigor, and
a high-bred courtesy, with keen relish
for the quaint and romantic aspects of
old New England life and history, a
highly cultivated taste and generous
literary accomplishment, with pleasant
humor sutfusing all, anu a conscious ex.
quisiteness of style in writing these all
belonged to edmund Quincy. He was q
man for Christmas guest or Christmas
host. No man at table or by the fire
would have told n merrier Jest in a hap.
pier way, and with that sense of mirth.
full appreciation which causes everybody
else to enjoy. 1t would have been q
nimble wit which excelled his repartee,
and reader memory that outstripped
his in apt allusion and happy quotation