Your logic strikes too near our warm tap-roots: 
  We shall breathe freer in our natural air
  Of common sense.  What are your gallipots
  And Latin labels to this fresh bouquet?—­
  Friend, ’tis a pure June morning.  Ask the bees,
  The butterflies, the birds, the little girls. 
  We are after flowers.  You are after—­what? 
  Aconite, hellebore, pulsatilla, rheum. 
  Take them and go! and take your burning lens! 
  We dare not bask in the sun’s genial beams
  Drawn to that spear-like point.  Truth comes and goes,
  Life-giving in diffusion.  Nature flows, extends,
  And veils us with herself,—­herself God’s veil. 
  But you persist in opening your bladders,
  And the three gases that compose the air
  You bid us take a breath of, one by one. 
  For Mother Nature you should have respect: 
  She does not like these teasings and these jokes. 
  Philosopher you seem; you’d state all fair;
  You would go deep and broad.  You’re right; but then
  Forget not there’s an outer to your inner,—­
  A whole that binds your parts,—­a truth for man
  As well as chemist,—­and your lecture-room,
  With magic vials and quaint essences
  And odors strange, may teach your students less
  Than this June morning, with the sun and flowers.

THOMAS JEFFERSON.[1]

The biography before us is so voluminous that it can hardly maintain the popularity to which its subject entitles it.  He must be a bold man, and to some degree forgetful of the brevity of life, who, for any ordinary purpose of information or amusement, undertakes to read these huge octavos.  True, the theme is somewhat extended; Jefferson’s life was a protracted and busy one; he took a leading part in complicated transactions, and promulgated doctrines which cannot be summarily discussed.  But the author’s prolixity has not grown out of the extent of his theme alone.  He is both diffuse and digressive.  He introduces much irrelevant matter, and tells everything in a round-about-way.  By a judicious exercise of the arts of elimination and compression, we think that all which illustrates the subject might have been comprised in one volume much smaller than the smallest of these.

But Mr. Randall’s most serious fault arises from his desire to be thought a fine writer.  Without making long extracts, it is impossible to give any conception of the absurdities into which this childish ambition has led him.  The tropes and metaphors, the tawdry tinsel, the common tricks of feeble rhetoricians are reproduced here as if they were the highest results of rhetorical art.  The display is often amusing.  Thus, in describing Mrs. John Adams, Mr. Randall says:  “Her lofty lineaments carried a trace of the Puritan severity.  They were those of the helmed Minerva, and not of the cestus-girdled Venus.”  We do not mention this in order to justify a strain of captious criticism, but to ask Mr. Randall, in all seriousness, how it