a nuisance as well as a blessing. Its
products are getting very much in the way, and the impulse of the world
is too strong to allow itself to be clogged by them. Something must be
done.

Among possibilities, let the following be suggested. The world may
perhaps return from unsymbolical to symbolical writing. There is a
science older than anything but shadowy traditions, and immemorially
linked with religion, poetry, and art. It is the almost forgotten
science of symbolism. Symbols, as compared with letters, are a higher
and more potent style of expression. They are the earthly shadows of
eternal truth. It is the language of the fine arts, of painting,
sculpture, the stage,--it will be the language of life, when, rising in
the scale of being, we shall return from the dead sea of literature to
the more energetic algebra of symbolical meanings. In these, the forms
of the reason and of Nature come into visible harmony; the hopes of man
find their shadows in the struggles of the universe, and the lights of
the spirit cluster myriad-fold around the objects of Nature. Let
Phoenician language be vivified into the universal poetry of
symbolism, and thought would then become life, instead of the ghost of
life. Current literature would give way to a new and true mythology;
authors and editors would suffer a transformation similar to that of
type-setters into artists, and of newsboys into connoisseurs; and the
figures of a noble humanity would fill the public mind, no longer
confused and degraded by the perpetual vision of leaden and unsuggestive
letters. From that time prose would be extinct, and poetry would be all
in all. History would renew its youth,--would find, after the struggles,
attainments, and developments of its manhood, that there is after all
nothing wiser in thought, no truer law, than the instincts of childhood.

Or, again: improvements have already been made which promise as an
ultimate result to transform the largest library into a miniature for
the pocket. Stenography may yet reach to a degree that it will be able
to write folios on the thumb-nail, and dispose all the literature of the
world comfortably in a gentleman's pocket, before he sets out on his
summer excursion. The contents of vast tomes, bodies of history and of
science, may be so reduced that the eye can cover them at a glance, and
the process of reading be as rapid as that of thought The mind, instead
of wearying of slow perusal, would have to spu