uades himself) the heathen's tragedy, replacing it with a
monastic legend; which legend is disfigured with fables in its
incidents, and yet, in a higher sense, is true, because interwoven with
Christian morals and with the sublimest of Christian revelations. Three,
four, five, centuries more find man still devout as ever; but the
language has become obsolete, and even for Christian devotion a new era
has arisen, throwing it into the channel of crusading zeal or of
chivalrous enthusiasm. The _membrana_ is wanted now for a knightly
romance--for "my Cid," or Coeur de Lion; for Sir Tristrem, or Lybaeus
Disconus. In this way, by means of the imperfect chemistry known to the
mediaeval period, the same roll has served as a conservatory for three
separate generations of flowers and fruits, all perfectly different, and
yet all specially adapted to the wants of the successive possessors. The
Greek tragedy, the monkish legend, the knightly romance, each has ruled
its own period. One harvest after another has been gathered into the
garners of man through ages far apart. And the same hydraulic machinery
has distributed, through the same marble fountains, water, milk, or
wine, according to the habits and training of the generations that came
to quench their thirst.

Such were the achievements of rude monastic chemistry. But the more
elaborate chemistry of our own days has reversed all these motions of
our simple ancestors, with results in every stage that to _them_ would
have realized the most fantastic amongst the promises of thaumaturgy.
Insolent vaunt of Paracelsus, that he would restore the original rose or
violet out of the ashes settling from its combustion--_that_ is now
rivalled in this modern achievement. The traces of each successive
handwriting, regularly effaced, as had been imagined, have, in the
inverse order, been regularly called back: the footsteps of the game
pursued, wolf or stag, in each several chase, have been unlinked, and
hunted back through all their doubles; and, as the chorus of the
Athenian stage unwove through the antistrophe every step that had been
mystically woven through the strophe, so, by our modern conjurations of
science, secrets of ages remote from each other have been exorcised[9]
from the accumulated shadows of centuries. Chemistry, a witch as potent
as the Erictho of Lucan, (_Pharsalia_, lib. vi. or vii.,) has extorted
by her torments, from the dust and ashes of forgotten centuries, the
secret