Vermont phÅ“nix. [volume] (Brattleboro, Vt.) 1834-1955, 1890-10-03

Few public men have ever been more
beautifully enveloped in romance than was
the Pathfinder" that year. His enemies
in VAIN endeavOred to speak the truly eff
fective word against him
Yet neither during the canvass of 1856
nor later was 1t necessary thus to resort to
artificial romancing in order to adorn the
character of one whom fortune had per
sistently made a man of marvels. There
was. As an actual fact, his gold mine on the
Maripusa grant. How curious an accident
this, that the "Congueror Of California
should by chance have purchased, before
the discovery of gold in the territory, the
only Mexican grant that covered any part
Of the gold region How wondrous that
this one grant should have contained SO ia
nous gold mine And yet this was not a
mere tale invented 10y friends, as were those
secrets of the great mind that for them Law
hidden behind the deep ewes nor was it
one Of the ISLANDERS of his foes. 1t was
plain and hard outer fact. The gold mine
had fallen to the hero and. like all his other
wonderful fortunes, it prolited him nothing:
SO that he has now died. as he so long lived
a poor man. 1t was this wonderful caprice
about his whole career, this repeated and
unheard-of kindliness of fortune and vet
this eternal failure and abortion of all his
great enterprises, which made his whole
life like dream to his fellows 1t was as
If "a character of pure poetry, some Jaques
or some lesser Round Table knight, had es-
capped from romance land, and were wan
dering about amongst live men on the earth.
Always, as the Odyssean gods show their
airy nature at the moment they vanish, this
fictitious being would bear about with him,
-. 1 4
ity. II you tried either business. or poll
tics, or warfare in his company, he would
at first seem so finely made and genuine a
live creature that the artful qualities of his
purely ideal and manufactured essence
would escape your notice. You would fancy
him TO be flesh and blood man, and great
one at that. Only, when You had once in
vested in his vast enterprises or had en-
trusted your beloved cause to his care, ere
long he would begin to show signs, as it
were, of vanishing. And by and by, after
much puzzling on your part as to the sin
cerity of his purposes and the true wisdom
of his schemes, you would come to observe
that, after all, things never happened tc
him as 10 mortal men, and that he bore
every mark Of being a fictitious character,
a man in play, an entity of the footlghts
purely literary fgment. You would then
indeed find that you had invested your
money or your trust in vain in his under
takiugs. They would come TO naught
while as for HMM what wise was he tC
blame ( Can a man help it if, despite all
| he is u fiction-a creature escaped from
book, wandering about in real world wher
| he was made for dreamland : OF course h,
has his character his fine qualities, hi,
plans, his hopes, his thoughts What Jaques
what Round Table knight, has not Ol
/ course, then, he could talk with you, plaI
with you, undertake vast things with you
and could himself accidentally come int,
possession of a gold miae or play at con
| quering a province But then of course
all this would be merely play, and you coulC
not hold him responsible for it,, Nothing
would come Of him in the end. In all hi
life he would accomplish absolutely no on
significant thing. A vague and ghostly in
dustry, ended only by death, would toucl
upon and begin a thousand things durin,
his career of fitting and of failing bu
that would be all He would have here n
temporal mission, because his only tru
place would be the world of shadows. II
would be subject TO no ordinary human es
innate Of his qualities in terms of thei
fruits, because he would bear no fruits, an
his qualities would be those Of romance.
Joshua Joyce in the October Atlantic.