colby_fam_b2_f33_d06_02

I'm both amused and vexed that it should be so.
When I sit as a sort of critical spectator in a crowd
of a score or more men and women
longing for companionship, but finding it not,
throughout the mortal tedium of a long, glorious
summer afternoon, when earth or through or
during a bright starlit winter eve, when earth
and air are full of poetry, and hear nothing
discussed, but money, and the means of getting it,
hear this one tell of her butter that one of her
cheese, one of his "crows", another of his calves &
swine, all talking at once and all of "one unchanging
theme" money, money, I'm sometimes think
of the nursery tale of the little old woman who
in a similar crowd kept saying at every lull
in the gab (isn't that the proper word?) "my goose,
she - - ". But ere she could enlighten her auditors as to
the wonderful feats of her "goose" (which for
ought I know, may have equalled or excelled that
famous biped that laid a golden egg every day,)
some one whose lungs were better stronger than her own
interrupted her, so that she got no further advanced
in her interesting story than her oft repeated "my goose
she - - " When I return from such a gathering, with
"my soul thirst and hunger" all unsatisfied, I am
more the vexed, I am pained, deeply pained that
the [human] mind should feed so contentedly on husks
and chaff, and I feel a wild longing of soul for a higher
and holier converse with my fellow beings. And I say
"Strange, that the mind formed Through the Universe to range,
Should so ignobly cling to earth, Fond of its trifles and its toys.