Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 4, no. 24 October 1859

Atlantic Monthly, vol 4, no. 24
(Oct 1859)

The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No.
24,
Oct. 1859, by Various #24 in our series by Various
Copyright laws are changing all over the world. Be sure to check the
copyright laws for your country before downloading or redistributing
this or any other Project Gutenberg eBook.
This header should be the first thing seen when viewing this Project
Gutenberg file. Please do not remove it. Do not change or edit the
header without written permission.
Please read the "legal small print," and other information about the
eBook and Project Gutenberg at the bottom of this file. Included is
important information about your specific rights and restrictions in how
the file may be used. You can also find out about how to make a
donation to Project Gutenberg, and how to get involved.
**Welcome To The World of Free Plain Vanilla Electronic Texts**
**eBooks Readable By Both Humans and By Computers, Since
1971**
*****These eBooks Were Prepared By Thousands of
Volunteers!*****
Title: The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 4, No. 24, Oct. 1859
Author: Various
Release Date: November, 2005 [EBook #9381] [Yes, we are more than

one year ahead of schedule] [This file was first posted on September 27,
2003]
Edition: 10
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC
MONTHLY, VOL. 4, NO. 24 ***

Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, and PG Distributed Proofreaders

THE
ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. IV.--OCTOBER, 1859.--NO. XXIV.

DAILY BEAUTY.
Toward the end of a city morning, that is, about four o'clock in the
afternoon, Stanford Grey, and his guest, Daniel Tomes, paused in an
argument which had engaged them earnestly for more than half an hour.
What they had talked about it concerns us not to know. We take them
as we find them, each leaning back in his chair, confirmed in the
opinion that he had maintained, convinced only of his opponent's
ability and rectitude of purpose, and enjoying the gradual subsidence of
the excitement that accompanies the friendliest intellectual strife as
surely as it does the gloved set-tos between those two "talented
professors of the noble science of self-defence" who beat each other
with stuffed buck-skin, at notably brief intervals, for the benefit of the
widow and children of the late lamented Slippery Jim, or some other
equally mysterious and eminent person.
The room in which they sat was one of those third rooms on the first
floor, by which city house-builders, self-styled architects, have made
the second room useless except at night, in their endeavor to reconcile a

desire for a multitude of apartments with the fancied necessity that
compels some men to live where land costs five dollars the square foot.
The various members of Mr. Grey's household designated this room by
different names. The servants called it the library; Mrs. Grey and two
small people, the delight and torment of her life, papa's study; and Grey
himself spoke of it as his workshop, or his den. Against every stretch of
wall a bookcase rose from floor to ceiling, upon the shelves of which
the books stood closely packed in double ranks, the varied colors of the
rows in sight wooing the eye by their harmonious arrangement. A
pedestal in one corner supported a half-size copy of the Venus of Milo,
that masterpiece of sculpture; in its faultless amplitude of form, its
large life-giving loveliness, and its sweet dignity, the embodiment of
the highest type of womanhood. In another corner stood a similar
reduction of the Flying Mercury. Between the bookcases and over the
mantel-piece hung prints;--most noticeable among them, Steinla's
engraving of Raphael's Sistine Madonna, and Toschi's reproduction, in
lines, of the luminous majesty of Correggio's St. Peter and St. Paul; and
these were but specimens of the treasures inclosed in a huge portfolio
that stood where the light fell favorably upon it. Opposite Grey's chair,
when in its place, (it was then wheeled half round toward his guest,) a
portrait of Raphael and one of Beethoven flanked a copy of the Avon
bust of Shakespeare; and where the wallpaper peeped through this thick
array of works of literature and art, it showed a tint of soft tea-green. In
the middle of the room a large library-table groaned beneath a mass of
books and papers, some of them arranged in formal order, others
disarranged by present use into that irregular order which seems chaotic
to every eye but one, while for that one the displacement of a single
sheet would insure perplexity and loss of time. But neither spreading
table nor towering cases seemed to afford their owner room enough to
store his printed treasures. Books were everywhere. Below the
windows the recesses were filled out