We seem to hear the
music of a thought, and care not if the understanding be not
gratified. For their beauty, consider the fables of Narcissus,
of Endymion, of Memnon son of Morning, the representative of all
promising youths who have died a premature death, and whose
memory is melodiously prolonged to the latest morning; the
beautiful stories of Phaeton, and of the Sirens whose isle shone
afar off white with the bones of unburied men; and the pregnant
ones of Pan, Prometheus, and the Sphinx; and that long list of
names which have already become part of the universal language of
civilized men, and from proper are becoming common names or
nouns,--the Sibyls, the Eumenides, the Parcae, the Graces, the
Muses, Nemesis, &c.
It is interesting to observe with what singular unanimity the
farthest sundered nations and generations consent to give
completeness and roundness to an ancient fable, of which they
indistinctly appreciate the beauty or the truth. By a faint and
dream-like effort, though it be only by the vote of a scientific
body, the dullest posterity slowly add some trait to the mythus.
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