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for plenty without pleasure, appears in Spanish as un ceno a oscuras. The poetic couplet,

"Though the mill of God grinds slowly,

It grinds exceeding small,"

with all its innumerable variations, is world-old almost, although the Italians have substituted the devil for the deity in the English text. The proverbial adventurer of society, English and American, who is he but "Don Nobody's son,” translated from the Spanish, in which the very definition of hidalgo (hijo d'algo) is the son of Don Somebody. Who is Mr. Parvenu, or Sir Stuck-up, or the great Veneer, but Don Elegantono, whose breeding is not equal to his elegance ?

How often, too, in a proverb in one language the philologist finds the orgin of a word in another. Thus a whim in German is a grasshopper in Italian; its transmutation from natural history into the world of latent lunacies, coming through the proverbial "Aver grilli in capo,"-to have grasshoppers in one's head-by which the vivacious Neapolitan indicates a man of hobbies. Certain phrases, not proverbs in themselves, appear to have the vitality of proverbs implanted in their very constitution; and this is particularly true of all felicitous epigrammatic coinages. Thus "frozen music,” as descriptive of a beautiful edifice, though no older than the days of Madame de Staël, has become a literary household word; and ébroulement, as indicative of the restlessness of the exotic few who are the poets and artists of the world, is quoted wherever criticism has penetrated.

The "music of the spheres" has come down through long ages, in the vortex in which Sapphic song has been lostthough with a perversion of meaning in its modern application. In its origin the phrase was peculiarly poetic. An ancient dream there was that angels guided the motions of the stars-a fancy to which Kepler, the great founder of celestial geometry, adhered to the day of his death, notwithstanding those wonderful discoveries that have handed down his name in equal honor with those of that trinity of astronomy, Newton, Copernicus, and Galileo. These angels, according to

the myth, accompanied their journeys with delicious music; and, hence, the phrase, "music of the spheres," as rendered by Milton in

"The morning stars sung together."

The Arab legend of Israfel, whose heart-strings were a lute; "And who sung so wildly well

That e'en the stars were mute,"

and stopped on their journey to listen to music more beautiful than their own-is a reminiscence of the primitive fancy which Plato translated into Greek, but did not originate.

The cosmical theory, upon which the myth was founded, readily accounts for its universality among the ancients, and suffered little modification previous to the dissemination of the Copernican astronomy. According to the conception of antiquity the cosmos was a kind of three-story house. The flat earth floated on a vast substratum of waters, designated as the waters under the earth, beneath which was the land of graves, or Hades, to which Virgil makes descent by way of the Avernian wier. The land of graves, reproduced in modern poetry by Dante in the Inferno, constituted the first story of the cosmical edifice, or, more properly, its cellar, peopled with goblins, ghosts, shades, and other imaginary inhabitants of similar habits. Above the earth was suspended the firmament, a vast metallic plate or basin supporting another illimitable waste of waters like that upon which rested the earth. Upon this upper ocean floated the land of heaven, with its inhabitants of angels, governed by Deity and basking forever in the lucidity of his glory. Between was the region of air, peopled by Lucifer and his attendant evil spirits.

From the second story of this cosmical house humanity listened to the music of the spheres in an objective and literal sense, by no means expressed in the modern application of the phrase to the mathematical regularity of the celestial gamut. Descartes, in his famous theory of vortices, was the first to deny that stellar bodies were kept in motion by volitions, but it was reserved for Newton to relegate them to the dominion of law in the discovery of universal gravitation; whence dates

VOL. XXVII.-NO. LIV.

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the ever-repeating tragedy of positive knowledge, in the puncturing, one after another, of many a beautiful myth with the stiletto of a fact. The Jupiter, Saturn and Mars of the Greeks have been dead for ages, and, phoenix-like, have sprung out of their ashes several very ordinary modern bodies, quite harmless, except in the possible accident of a collision. Lunawhence lunatic, because the moon was supposed to make mad, its shifting phases being supposed to modify madness-has been transformed into a very matter-of-fact, and by no means madness-inducing moon. Still, lunatic legends are not wholly wanting even now. There are yet those who attribute mysterious properties to moonshine. People enough there are who would never dare to fall asleep with the moon shining in their faces, lest they might wake up blind in the morning, and many a farmer still believes that vegetables planted in one phase of the moon run to tops or leaves, while, planted in the other, they are pretty sure to bear fruit quite extravagantly. Both myths are relics of the ancient, as is that of good luck or bad depending upon the shoulder over which the new moon is first seen to which is traceable the vulgar idiom, "over the left." Very ancient, too, is the idea that moonshine must not be permitted to fall on the face of a sleeping infant, its beams inducing idiocy.

But to return. The very ancient cosmical conception, which the Greeks modified a little, affords the key, not only to the genesis of phrases like the "music of the spheres," but to the genesis of the strange mythology of the ancients, and of the stranger gnosticism that supplanted it in the general acceptance of the Platonic philosophy. Standing in the first story of the cosmical edifice, through rifts and crannies of skylight, man saw angels and had glimpses of the glory of godscaught tremulous whiffs of music, and listened day and night, awake as well as in dreams, to the lyrics of seraphim. Fantastic clouds fashioned themselves, to his imagination, into wings of angels, into supernal faces, into wierd omens of good or evil, into golden cars hurried hither and thither by winged horses, in which rode gods.

Little more did Plato than to reduce this many-colored

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garland of myths to something like rational order. And the æons of the Gnostics, what are they but the ideas of Plato, enveloped in atmospheres of visible glory, and resouled with a modicum of the Platonic world-soul? How like a romantic mythology reads the system of the great Greek master! Besides real men, horses and trees, an ideal man, horse or tree, was supposed to exist; and every particular man, horse and tree consisted of abstract existence, modelled after the ideal. Plato, for example, was abstract existence, with the addition of animality, humanity, and Platonicity. An ideal world of universals stood at the head of the real world of particulars, and God had created the world, according to Plato, by encumbering mere ideas with envelopes of visible matter, which, being more or less imperfect in its plasticity, represented the original idea with more or less imperfection. Beyond this, and at its very root, lay the unencumbered idea of ideas, representing a sort of world-soul and sum-total of all cosmical activities; while still beyond lay the region of the absolutely ideal God, whose fulness was expressed by Cato in the world-soul, and by the Gnostics in the gamut of æons.

Thus crawls philosophy out of myth, using the word to represent the unproved. Thus, too, science, both manifesting in all ages a singular tendency to resolve themselves into their legendary originals. For example, what is Mr. Murphy's "Formative Intelligence;" what Sir William Hamilton's "Unconditioned;" what Herbert Spencer's " Unknowable;" what Professor Huxley's "Molecular Activity," but the Gnostic pleroma, or the Platonic world-soul, or the Hindoo Brahman over again, with a different name? But if the name is more scientific, what is it but a verbal equivalent for the same fundamental conception and the same pantheism?

The difference is that, while philosophy emerges from ontological myths, science has its root in the gradual reclaiming of myths of natural history, metamorphosis, and transmutation. The Göthe of Latin poetry writes:

"Linquitur, ut merito maternum nomen adepta

Terra sit, et terra quoniam sunt cuncta creata ;"

adding as a reason further for the epithet of Mother Earth: "Multaque nunc etiam existant animalia terris:"

thus enunciating the very first myth of physics, that living creatures spring out of the earth. Further on, the poet gives his rationale of this genesis of all living, adding that they (living creatures) are developed by rain-water and by warm vapors generated by the sun's heat. Old this primitive myth of science is as the Mosaic cosmogony. But old as it is, there is another of equal antiquity: that the corruption of one body is the generation of another. In accordance with the latter, a seed was supposed to die before the young plant sprang from it-an idea which St. Paul in his most fervid mood makes the basis of an illustration, in the eloquent passage: "Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened, except it die."

An earlier allusion to it is contained in Samson's riddle of the generation of bees from the dead body of a lion, with which he puzzles his inveterate enemies:

"Out of the eater came forth meat,

And out of the strong came forth sweetness,"

which in the seventeenth century was quoted in opposition to Redi's conclusion from experiments, that all living things, to whatsoever order belonging, are propagated by germs.

To the ancient mind, the earth was a great mother teeming with living millions by spontaneous generation. An eternal transmigration of atoms was going on everywhere; atoms taking new forms and reappearing in new organisms by action of an ever-sleepless volition impelling them, and of a profound instinct implanted in their very constitution. Thus the atom represented a sort of eternity of living existence, passing by transmigration through an endless succession of organic bodies, and returning to its old state of a sentient monad, only to assist in the integration of new bodies. Men came and went, but the monad was forever.

Between this myth of the transmigration of living atoms and that other of the transmigration of souls runs a strange sort of analogical resemblance. But how were these atoms-these self-existent protoplasms-nucleated into organisms having hands, feet, heads—in a word, members? Here again, ancient

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