<h2 class="nobreak"><SPAN name="DE_MOSQUITONE" id="DE_MOSQUITONE">DE MOSQUITONE.</SPAN></h2>
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<p class="decocap tp">IF the Bruce loved his instructive spider, for which history does
not vouch, why should not the public mosquito be dear to desponding
minds, as a yet more victorious exponent of the value of perseverance
and a set purpose? Who hath circumvented her? She laughs at all
dissuasion. She evades the soldier's gun, the physician's potion; the
Sophi with his fleet cannot drive her away, nor the Czar impale her
in any dungeon. What the mosquito came hitherward to do, that she
does. The "moral runs at large."</p>
<p>It is all very well to abuse her; one gets a poor, childish
satisfaction out of such terms of endearment as can be readily
bestowed: unfledged Tamerlane! disturber of the sanctities of<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_167" id="Page_167">-167-</SPAN></span> night!
Satan of summer joys!—and so on. What avails all that? We have to
bow our necks, and endure her diabolics. She is an evil which the
Constitution cannot remedy; and as we are given to understand that
she does not speak English, no protest formulated in that tongue can
pierce her horny and tyrannical heart.</p>
<p>The believing soul may picture her primarily in some sweet, decorous
frolic through the glades of Eden (for charity would even accord to
her the possibility of a state of first innocence), frisking airily
with birds-of-Paradise, and given wholly to honorable practices. Ah!
but what man is proof against violent thoughts of Father Noah, who,
when she had already entered on her vein-glorious, flesh-loving,
back-biting, and peace-disturbing career, gave her the shelter
of his house through troublous days, and, like the short-sighted
philanthropist that he was, cursed the four continents in befriending
two obstreperous insects?</p>
<p>I cannot consider any cosmic force more emi<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_168" id="Page_168">-168-</SPAN></span>nently practical. The
poet lauds a river-bank, and sheds on a grove the starry fascinations
of rhetoric; it is none other than Mosquito who induces you to hate
and shun what you would fain be persuaded to consider fair. She it
is who can make the greenest landscape odious, and the calm haunts
of trees vociferous as if all Bedlam were let loose under their
outspread arms. She is your best circumnavigator. I cannot picture
to my wildest speculations a place where she is not. Nowhere is she
an exile, but hath her native bog all over Christendom. She holds
her cannibalistic orgies wherever human foot hath trodden. In that
Land which, geographically, is No Man's, methinks she prowleth
still, looking for him. Howsoever arrant a folly it be to ignore so
great an influence on our personal behavior, so huge a factor in the
reckoning of men's woes, little enough is recorded of this wretched
anthropophaginian. Dante did weakly, inasmuch as she figured not as
chief tormentor among his perpetually condemned. The cricket, the
glow-worm, the ant, the mole, long since<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_169" id="Page_169">-169-</SPAN></span> found their bards, but no
prophetic malediction has fallen from Parnassus on their evil-minded
cousin. There must needs be a greater than Milton to pronounce her
anathema.</p>
<p>The immense malignity of her disposition is, with superlative
cunning, cloaked under her bodily slenderness and aerial grace. What
monstrous discrepancy betwixt her and her doings! By what unheard-of
perverseness in the natural order is she framed delicately as a
kind sunbeam, or a fragment of sea-foam? On the theory of physical
degeneracy, we may consider her in the archetypal plan to have been
a grim enormity, like Regulus's Bagrada serpent, a candidate of
yore for the attentions of some Jack-the-Giant-Killer, who, should
he arise to-day, might prove but a clumsy blunderer in face of her
impish agilities.</p>
<p>Helpless victim that I am, I look at Mosquito with unmixed awe. I
harbor grotesque superstitions, and build up romances in her name.
Why not metempsychosis? This marvellous restlessness,—might it not
once have<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_170" id="Page_170">-170-</SPAN></span> been a human thing? What if some world-scourge, like
Attila, were pent in these narrow bounds, and sent whirring through
space again, on the old, colossal mission of annoyance? Involuntarily
I scan Mosquito with no humbler glass than a telescope. Even to the
dignity of a malignant planet hath she attained in mine unjaundiced
eye. Straightway, as fear building on fear, mount my fancies,
memories, speculations, till on their topmost pinnacle flashes the
saying of the liberal philosophers, that the immortal principle
may not be lacking in the "meanest thing that feels;" and my sole,
honest, overwhelming impulse is to forswear the pious Sunday-school
hope of becoming an angel, that is, a winged creature, lest in any
phase of untried being, Mosquito! I should bear affinity to that
which thou art.</p>
<div class="center">
<div class="poem">
<p><span class="i6">——"Execrable shape,</span><br/>
That dar'st, tho' grim and terrible, advance<br/>
Thy miscreated front across my way!"</p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Is it not an apostrophe to thee? What fiend was it yesterday moved my
shuddering lips to<span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_171" id="Page_171">-171-</SPAN></span> quote that gentlest strophe over thy flattened
corpusculum, meant, peradventure, for a kindlier spirit?—</p>
<div class="center">
<div class="poem">
<p>"My sprightly neighbor! gone before<br/>
To that unknown and silent shore,<br/>
Shall we not meet as heretofore<br/>
<span class="i2">Some summer morning?"</span></p>
</div>
</div>
<p>Such is the irony of revenge.</p>
<p>Dread Reminiscence! appalling Probability! disconcerting and
inescapable Fact! thou art the Inscrutable, the Unattainable, the
Never-Reached, I take it, of the metaphysical circle. In deference to
thee, I salute the hem of a mosquito-net.</p>
<p>In the watches of the night, my soul shall rejoice to behold thy
wrathful eye outside.</p>
<p class="illo">
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<hr />
<p><span class="pagenum"><SPAN name="Page_172" id="Page_172">-172-</SPAN></span></p>
<p class="illo">
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