A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder James De Mille

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are. It shows us a world where our evil is made a good, and our good
an evil; there all that we consider a blessing is had in
abundance--prolonged and perpetual sunlight, riches, power, fame--and
yet these things are despised, and the people, turning away from them,
imagine that they can find happiness in poverty, darkness, death, and
unrequited love. The writer thus mocks at all our dearest passions and
strongest desires; and his general aim is to show that the mere search
for happiness per se is a vulgar thing, and must always result in
utter nothingness. The writer also teaches the great lesson that the
happiness of man consists not in external surroundings, but in the
internal feelings, and that heaven itself is not a place, but a state.
It is the old lesson which Milton extorted from Satan:
"'What matter where, if I be still the same--'
"Or again:
"'The mind is its own place, and of itself
Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven--'"
"That's good too," cried Oxenden. "That reminds me of the German
commentators who find in the Agamemnon of AEschylus or the OEdipus
of Sophocles or the Hamlet of Shakespeare motives and purposes
of which the authors could never have dreamed, and give us a
metaphysical, beer-and-tobacco, High-Dutch Clytemnestra or Antigone or
Lady Macbeth. No, my boy, More was a simple sailor, and had no idea of
satirizing anything."
"How, then, do you account for the perpetual undercurrent of meaning
and innuendo that may be found in every line?"
"I deny that there is anything of the sort," said Oxenden. "It is a
plain narrative of facts; but the facts are themselves such that they
give a new coloring to the facts of our own life. They are in such
profound antithesis to European ways that we consider them as being
written merely to indicate that difference. It is like the Germania
of Tacitus, which many critics still hold to be a satire on Roman
ways, while as a matter of fact it is simply a narrative of German
manners and customs."
"I hope," cried Melick, "that you do not mean to compare this awful