No lark or linnet or redbreast or
mocking-bird could live, much less warble, in those carbonic times. The
world, like a Mississippi steamer, was coaling, with an eye to the
needs of its future biped passengers. The embryotic earth was then
truly a Niflheim, or Mistland,--a dun, fuming region. Those were the
days, perhaps, when Nox reigned, and the great mundane egg was hatching
in the oven-like heat, from which the winged boy Eros leaped forth,
"his back glittering with golden plumes, and swift as eddying air." We
have it on good authority, that the Adirondack Mountains of New York,
and the Grampian Hills of Scotland, where Norval was to feed his
flocks, had already upheaved their bare backs from the boiling caldrons
of the sea, thus stealing a march on the Alps and many other more
famous mountains.
How opposite and remote from each other are the mythologic ages and the
nineteenth century! The critical and scientific spirit of the one is in
strange contrast with the credulous, blindly reverent spirit of the
other. Mythology delegated the government of the world to inferior
deities, the subjects of an omnipotent Fate or Necessity; while, to
show how extremes meet, mere science delegates it to chemical and
physiological agencies, and ends, like the mythic cosmogonies, in some
irrepressible spontaneous impulse of matter to develope itself in the
ever-changing forms of the visible universe.
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