on turning to the title-page, I found
thus mysteriously expressed: "In the 7000th year of Astronomical
History, and the first day of Intellectual Life or Moral World, from
the aera of this work." Another slight indication of craziness appeared
in a notion which obstinately haunted his mind that all the kings and
rulers of the earth would confederate in every age against his works,
and would hunt them out for extermination as keenly as Herod did the
innocents in Bethlehem. On this consideration, fearing that they might
be intercepted by the long arms of these wicked princes before they
could reach that remote Stewartian man or his precursor to whom they
were mainly addressed, he recommended to all those who might be
impressed with a sense of their importance to bury a copy or copies of
each work properly secured from damp, &c. at a depth of seven or eight
feet below the surface of the earth; and on their death-beds to
communicate the knowledge of this fact to some confidential friends,
who in their turn were to send down the tradition to some discreet
persons of the next generation; and thus, if the truth was not to be
dispersed for many ages, yet the knowledge that here and there the
truth lay buried on this and that continent, in secret spots on Mount
Caucasus--in the sands of Biledulgerid--and in hiding-places amongst
the forests of America, and was to rise again in some distant age and
to vegetate and fructify for the universal benefit of man,--this
knowledge at least was to be whispered down from generation to
generation; and, in defiance of a myriad of kings crusading against
him, Walking Stewart was to stretch out the influence of his writings
through a long series of [Greek: lampadophoroi] to that child of
nature whom he saw dimly through a vista of many centuries. If this
were madness, it seemed to me a somewhat sublime madness; and I
assured him of my co-operation against the kings, promising that I
would bury "The Harp of Apollo" in my own orchard in Grasmere at the
foot of Mount Fairfield; that I would bury "The Apocalypse of Nature"
in one of the coves of Helvellyn, and several other places best known
to myself. He accepted my offer with gratitude; but he then made known
to me that he relied on my assistance for a still more important
service--which was this: in the lapse of that vast number of ages
which would probably intervene between the present period and the
period at which his works would have reached