The great crystal was sent to Holland, as the only place
where it could be properly cut. We have lately seen a brilliant which,
if not a mountain of light, was yet a very respectable mound of
radiance, valued at some ten or twelve thousand dollars, cut in this
virgin settlement, and exposed in one of our shop-windows to tempt our
frugal villagers.
Monsieur Trousseau, Professor in the Medical School of Paris, delivered
a discursive lecture not long ago, in which he soared from the region
of drugs, his well-known special province, into the thin atmosphere
of aesthetics. It is the influence that surrounds his fortunate
fellow-citizens, he declares, which alone preserves their intellectual
supremacy. If a Parisian milliner, he says, remove to New York, she will
so degenerate in the course of a couple of years that the squaw of a
Choctaw chief would be ashamed to wear one of her bonnets.
Listen, O Parisian cockney, pecking among the brood most plethoric with
conceit, of all the coop-fed citizens who tread the pavements of earth's
many-chimneyed towns! America has made implements of husbandry which
out-mow and out-reap the world. She has contrived man-slaying engines
which kill people faster than any others. She has modelled the
wave-slicing clipper which outsails all your argosies and armadas.
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