The Project Gutenberg EBook of Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April
1863, by Various

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Title: Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863
Devoted to Literature and National Policy

Author: Various

Release Date: August 19, 2009 [EBook #29736]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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THE

CONTINENTAL MONTHLY:

DEVOTED TO

LITERATURE AND NATIONAL POLICY.

VOL. III.--APRIL, 1863.--No. IV.

THE WONDERS OF WORDS.

Every nation has its legend of a 'golden age'--when all was young and
fresh and fair--'_comme les couleurs primitives de la nature_'--even
before the existence of this gaunt shadow of Sorrow--_the shadow of
ourselves_--that ever stalks in company with us;--an epoch of Saturnian
rule, when gods held sweet converse with men, and man primeval bounded
with all the elasticity of god-given juvenility:

('Ah! remember,
This--all this--was in the olden
Time long ago.')

And even now, in spite of our atheism and our apathism, amid all the
overwhelming world-influences of this great 'living Present'--the ghost
of the dead Past will come rushing back upon us with its solemn voices
and its infinite wailings of pity: but soft and faint it comes; for the
wild jarrings of the Now almost prevent us from hearing its still, small
voices. It

'Is but a _dim-remembered_ story
Of the old time entombed.'

Besides, what is History but the story of the bygone? The elegy, too,
comes to us as the last lamenting, sadly solemn swan-song of that
glorious golden time. And, indeed, are not all poesies but various notes
of that mighty diapason of Thought and Feeling, that has, through the
ages, been singing itself in jubilee and wail?

So it is in the individual--(for is not the individual ever the
rudimental, formula-like expression of that awful problem which nations
and humanity itself are slowly and