s of a life extinct for the general eye, but still glowing in the
embers. Even the fable of the Phoenix--that secular bird, who
propagated his solitary existence, and his solitary births, along the
line of centuries, through eternal relays of funeral mists--is but a
type of what we have done with Palimpsests. We have backed upon each
Phoenix in the long _regressus_, and forced him to expose his ancestral
Phoenix, sleeping in the ashes below his own ashes. Our good old
forefathers would have been aghast at our sorceries; and, if they
speculated on the propriety of burning Dr Faustus, _us_ they would have
burned by acclamation. Trial there would have been none; and they could
no otherwise have satisfied their horror of the brazen profligacy
marking our modern magic, than by ploughing up the houses of all who had
been parties to it, and sowing the ground with salt.

Fancy not, reader, that this tumult of images, illustrative or allusive,
moves under any impulse or purpose of mirth. It is but the coruscation
of a restless understanding, often made ten times more so by irritation
of the nerves, such as you will first learn to comprehend (its _how_ and
its _why_) some stage or two ahead. The image, the memorial, the record,
which for me is derived from a palimpsest, as to one great fact in our
human being, and which immediately I will show you, is but too repellent
of laughter; or, even if laughter _had_ been possible, it would have
been such laughter as often times is thrown off from the fields of
ocean[10]--laughter that hides, or that seems to evade mustering
tumult; foam-bells that weave garlands of phosphoric radiance for one
moment round the eddies of gleaming abysses; mimicries of earth-born
flowers that for the eye raise phantoms of gaiety, as oftentimes for the
ear they raise echoes of fugitive laughter, mixing with the ravings and
choir-voices of an angry sea.

What else than a natural and mighty palimpsest is the human brain? Such
a palimpsest is my brain; such a palimpsest, O reader! is yours.
Everlasting layers of ideas, images, feelings, have fallen upon your
brain softly as light. Each succession has seemed to bury all that went
before. And yet in reality not one has been extinguished. And if, in the
vellum palimpsest, lying amongst the other _diplomata_ of human archives
or libraries, there is any thing fantastic or which moves to laughter,
as oftentimes there is in the grotesque collisions of those successive