odding, mentioned erudition and
madness, on equal footing, as the twin results of books: "_Libri quosdam
ad scientiam, quosdam ad insaniam deduxere_." These were successive
symptoms of the growing malady. But where there was one writer in the
time of Geyler, there are a million now. He saw both health and disease,
and could distinguish between them. We see only the latter. Skill in
letters, half a decade of centuries ago, was a miraculous attainment,
and placed its possessor in the rank of divines and diviners; now,
inability to read and write is accounted, with pauperism and crime, a
ground for civil disfranchisement. The old feudal merry and hearty
ignorance has been everywhere corrupted by books and newspapers,
learning and intelligence, the cabalistic words of modern life. Popular
poetry and music, ballads and legends, wit and originality have
disappeared before the barbaric intellectuality of our Cadmean idolatry.
Even the arts of conversation and oratory are waning, and may soon be
lost; we live only in second and silent thoughts: for who will waste
fame and fortune by giving to his friends the gems which will delight
mankind? and how can a statesman grapple eloquently with Fate, when the
contest is not to be determined on the spot, but by quiet and remote
people coolly reading his speech several hours or days later? Even if we
were vagarying into imbecility, like the wildest Neo-Platonic
hierophants, like the monkish chroniclers of the Middle Ages, like other
romantic and fantastic theorists who have leaped out of human nature
into a purely artificial realm, we should not know it, because we are
all doing it uniformly.

The universe is a veiled Isis. The human mind from immemorial antiquity
has ceased to regard it. A small cohort of alphabets has enrobed it with
a wavy texture of letters, beyond which we cannot penetrate. The glamour
is upon us, and when we would see the facts of Nature, we behold only
tracts of print. The God of the heavens and earth has hidden Himself
from us since we gave ourselves up to the worship of the false
divinities of Phoenicia. No longer can we admire the _cosmos_; for the
_cosmos_ lies beyond a long perspective of theorems and propositions
that cross our eyes, like countless bees, from the alcoves of
philosophies and sciences. No longer do we bask in the beauty of things,
as in the sunlight; for when we would melt in feeling, we hear nothing
but the rattling of gems of verse. No long