Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The North American Review, Vol. 79
A grate or stove, rather than a subterranean furnace, may be supposed to warm this imagined house. It was not enough that the bright creature, fire, once the happiest of the social circle, as it danced freely on a broad, Open hearth, - received the stone of coal, when it asked for the bread of wood. It was imprisoned a long time in stoves, and now is condemned to the Plutonic region of the cellar, with nothing to commemo rate its departure except the small open grave or vault of a register. We ignore so summary a disposal of an Old friend; and, inasmuch as the obsolete fireplace is but a dim tradition of the past, the poetry and theology of art must be sought for in the stove, notwithstanding it has been vilified as a red-hot demon. A stove, or a grate, is at first a seemingly rotten stone next, a rude mass of metal; then, by the ingenious art of casting, in a variety of sand which appears to have been expressly provided for the purpose, it is moulded into elabo rate figures. The brown, crumbling ore grows, blooms, and ripens into vines, ?owers, and fruits of iron. It is an unfold ing of one intent of Nature, the susceptibility certifying the intent.
Of embroidered mats and ottomans, the same can hardly be said. Woollen doves and merino roses may be an improve ment on the tangled and soiled garment of the sheep; but the occupation is so utterly mechanical and so slightly useful, that woman's needle thus employed is as worthless as the famous Cleopatra's Needle. Damask curtains, or any tissues of silk, are not open to a like objection. The silk-worm, with no im provable intellect, spins the silver fibre, subtile as a ray of light, as if with conscious reference to the use man will make of it; and man spins it as a remunerative trade. In designing the cocoon, the Creator has emphatically recognized human ih dustry as cooperative with him; his purpose is silently uttered, yet as plainly as when he said to Moses, Thou shalt make the tabernacle with curtains of fine-twined linen, and blue and purple and scarlet.
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