A feeling many a year forgot, Now like a dream anew recurring; As if again in every vein Her mother's milk were stirring. ' Or that legend of the Roman daughter which drew forth the tribute The starry fable of the Milky Way Or a dead mother's lineaments O that those lips had language ! 107 Or her spiritual revisitings Uttered not, yet comprehended, Was the spirit's voiceless prayer ; All bespeaks the indelible character of human affection, sympathetically ramified through the correlation of maternity. It is this that makes history historical; that throws on the page of the past its dominant lights and shadows. The masters of pathos and tragic terror have come hither in all times for their inspiration. Witness Hamlet and Lear. Witness, in shapes how different, Andromache and Clytemnæstra-the breast opened "tearful - smilingly" to receive Astyanax, the breast bared beseechingly to stay Orestes.1 109 57. Art and profound Feeling have each their correlation, through the meanings of the Breast and the ministries of the Hand: even so has Thought, and its organ the Brain, through the endowed human Tongue. The use of language, like the use of fire, meets us in the dawn of Hellenic literature, as the distinctive and demarcating note of man. Men have words, which are projected ideas; brutes have only sounds, which are projected sensations. Brutes vociferate: men speak. The physical organization is wedded to the mental capacity-a mouth, and wisdom. Neither, apart, would effloresce into Language: both must conspire and combine. So the one mind which has thoughts to be interpreted is furnished in the human tongue with an all-accomplished interpreter. Compared with the concealed nerve-filaments concerned in this office, "the meshes of the spider's web, or the cordage of a man-ofwar, are few and simple. The ape," on the contrary, "does not articulate, first, because the organs are not perfect to this end; secondly, because the nerves do not associate these organs in that variety of action which is necessary to speech; and lastly, were all the exterior apparatus perfect, there is no impulse to that act of speaking." 110 The mere animal, with no ideas to express or record, has no means, then, of expressing or recording them. In the case of man, with a tongue to utter speech, and a hand to fix it, one triumph of intellect accumulates on another, and achievement is piled on achievement as the centuries flit past to him, "Time, growing old, teacheth all things." The world of brutes is bookless. A book is the product of a Mind, a Tongue, a Hand; a mind thinking, a tongue speaking, a hand writing: not any one, but all three. Articulate speech and its progeny -the alphabet, numerals, writing, printing, the electric telegraph-consider what man is with these, and what he would have been without them, and you have the means of gauging the significance of the correlation of the brain. 58. Even then if we restrict ourselves to indications that are of a mixed nature, and largely corporeal, taking no account of man's religious faculty- his sense of responsibility, his impulse of prayer, his forecastings of hereafter, his vision of the invisible; all the world of thought and feeling betokened by the bended knee, the clasped hand, and the uplifted eye-there still arise differentiating prerogatives which no residuary similitudes can mask or stifle, and which part him peremptorily from the brutes. Nor are these supreme superiorities self-elaborated: "it is HE that hath made us, and not we ourselves." There is indeed a species of self-jugglery by long and patient persistence in which this truth may cease to be seen. "The theory of transmutation of species has met with some degree of favour from many naturalists, from their desire to dispense, as far as possible, with the repeated intervention of a First Cause. Doubts are engendered in the student's mind as to whether species may not be equally unreal [with genera]. He is probably first struck with the phenomenon that some individuals are made to deviate widely from the ordinary type by the force of peculiar circumstances. How far, he asks, may such variations extend in the course of indefinite periods of time? . His first opinions are now fairly unsettled, he is in danger of falling into any new and visionary doctrine which may be presented to him ; for he now regards every part of the animate creation as void of stability, and in a state of continual flux. Henceforth his speculations know no definite bounds; he gives the rein to conjecture, and fancies that the outward form, internal structure, instinctive faculties, nay, that reason itself, may have been gra dually developed from some of the simplest states of existence that all animals, that man himself, and the irrational beings may have had one common origin; that all may be parts of one continuous and progressive scheme of development; in fine, he renounces his belief in the high genealogy of his species, and looks forward. as if in compensation, to the future perfectibility of man, in his physical, intellectual, and moral attributes."* Is this sketch of the pantheist's progress a portrait or a prophecy? Certain it is that Mr. Darwin makes boast that he met a Mentor, and has led captive a disciple. 59. Till this eminent authority shall himself recall and cancel expressions of opinion than which none sounder or more sensible are associated with his name, we may pardonably, notwithstanding, ascribe Mr. Darwin's vaunt to the self-deceptive eagerness of precarious speculation to impress into its service influential support. But the "Origin of Species," beyond all doubt, * Lyell's Principles of Geology, B. III. Ch. ii. Compare-“Judgeing from the past we may safely infer that not one living species will transmit its unaltered likeness to a distant futurity. . Hence we may look with some confidence to a secure future of equally inappreciable length. And as Natural Selection works solely by and for the good of each being, all corporeal and mental endowments will tend to progress towards perfection."-Darwin, p. 489. "I have reason to believe that one great authority, Sir C. Lyell, from further reflection "entertains grave doubts," &c. p. 311. |