Chapter 1. A Disquisition On Circles

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_ CHAPTER I. A DISQUISITION ON CIRCLES

"In circle following circle."

The horse at the cider-mill; the mules in the press-room of the American Tract Society; and the watchman who walks his drowsy round until he falls asleep; are not the only beings that spend their lives in traversing a circle. As the curve is the true line of beauty, and as the circle in Egyptian hieroglyphics is ever used as the symbol of renewed life--the type or sign of the generative principle--so the motion produced by the centripetal and centrifugal forces, seems to be that of nature. We are often told of the never-ending domestic duties of the faithful housewife, doomed--

"To tread the same dull circle round and round;"--

The parson often discourses touching the round of his parochial duties; and who does not sympathize with the diurnal editor at the thought of the harassing duties devolving upon him, "in circles incessant." The man of the world, and the sensualist, dance the giddy round of pleasure. The judge goes his circuit, to bring men to justice in this world, and the self-denying missionary traverses his, to save them from it in the next. It is very true that the periphery of the circles traversed by some persons and objects, is greater than that of others. One man walks the circumference of his duties in a single day; another in a week; while it may require the whole life of the third to perform the journey. Many members of Congress make speeches in circles, whether arguing abstruse points of constitutional law, or the claims of a party candidate; as do lawyers their cases at the bar, proving the foregoing proposition by the following, and inferring the following from the foregoing. Cast a stone into a lake or a mill-pond, and it will produce a succession of motions, circle following circle in order, and extending the radius until they disappear in the distance. The political movements of nations are circular. Under the severe pressure of despotism the people rise in their fury, and snap their chains asunder. A republic follows; degenerating first into a rude and wild democracy; and thence into a cruel and more turbulent anarchy. As a relief from the evils of this, the people, sighing for repose, fly back again into the arms of despotism. But with a people who have once tasted the sweets of liberty, this kind of tranquillity is short. Maddened by wrongs, real or supposed, they are soon prepared again to rush into the death-dance of revolution. The "one eternal principle" of the Chinese, forming "the first link in the great material chain" of their system, is represented by a circle. Time wings his flight in circles, and every year rolls round within itself. Hence the poets sing of "the circling years." The sun turns round upon his own axis; and the moon "changes monthly in her circled orb." The other celestial bodies all wheel their courses in circles around the common centre. The moons of Jupiter revolve around him in circles, and he carries them along with him in his periodical circuit round the sun. Saturn always moves within his rings, and thus adorned himself, walks in circles through the regions of space:--

"And other planets circle other suns."

A ship on the ocean, though apparently bounding over a plain of waters, rides in fact upon the circumference of a circle around the arch of the earth's diameter. The brisk swallow cuts the air in circles; the vampire wheels circularly about your head; the timid hare flees the ravenous pack of the sportsman in a winding course, until in despair it returns to die in its form. The lunar circle betokens a tempest;--modern writers on pneumatics affirm every breeze that blows, from the gentle-breathing zephyr to the rude northeastern blast, to be a whirlwind; and the beautiful hues of the iris, bright with hope and promise, play upon the melting clouds in the segment of a circle. The eagle soars toward the heavens in curves, as though measuring the angles of distant objects by geometrical figures; and the drunkard, when unable longer to control his movements, describes a curvilinear path as he reels homeward from his revels, and waits at his bed-side to catch hold of a post as it "comes round again." Those German principalities which are represented in the Diet, are denominated circles; and if a man is so ignorant as not to know that the moss always grows on the north side of a tree, and consequently gets lost in the woods, he invariably makes the discovery by finding that he has been unconsciously traversing a circle. Indeed, with most of our race the journey of human life would be circular, were it not that it has both a beginning and an end,--and so has a circle, if you could find them. From all which it follows, that by the laws of the universe, all things, animate and inanimate, move in revolutionary harmony; and though complex in their machinery as the wheels of Ezekiel's vision, are yet so perfect and beautiful in their order, as to have suggested to the ancients the poetical idea of "the music of the spheres." And now for the truth of the foregoing propositions in geometrical physics, they shall, in at least one striking instance, be illustrated by a few passages from the life and adventures of a quondam acquaintance of mine, whose name stands at the head of this bit of biography. _

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