He spoke of the new novels of Cooper, and “Peep
at the Pilgrims,” and “Saratoga,”
with praise, and named with accuracy the characters
in them. He likes to have a person always reading
to him, or company talking in his room, and is better
the next day after having visitors in his chamber from
morning to night.
He received a premature report of his son’s
election, on Sunday afternoon, without any excitement,
and told the reporter he had been hoaxed, for it was
not yet time for any news to arrive. The informer,
something damped in his heart, insisted on repairing
to the meeting-house, and proclaimed it aloud to the
congregation, who were so overjoyed that they rose
in their seats and cheered thrice. The Reverend
Mr. Whitney dismissed them immediately.
When life has been well spent, age is a loss of what
it can well spare,—muscular strength, organic
instincts, gross bulk, and works that belong to these.
But the central wisdom, which was old in infancy, is
young in fourscore years, and, dropping off obstructions,
leaves in happy subjects the mind purified and wise.
I have heard that whoever loves is in no condition
old. I have heard, that, whenever the name of
man is spoken, the doctrine of immortality is announced;
it cleaves to his constitution. The mode of it
baffles our wit, and no whisper comes to us from the
other side. But the inference from the working
of intellect, hiving knowledge, hiving skill,—at
the end of life just ready to be born,—affirms
the inspirations of affection and of the moral sentiment.
* * * *
*
Lectures on the Science of Languages,
delivered at the Royal Institution of Great Britain
in April, May, and June, 1861. By MAX MUeLLER,
M.A., Fellow of All-Souls College, Oxford; Corresponding
Member of the Imperial Institute of France.
London: Longman, Green, Longman, & Roberts.
1861. 8vo. pp. xii., 399.
The name of Mr. Max Mueller is familiar to American
students as that of a man who, learned in the high
German fashion, has the pleasant faculty, unhappily
too rare among Germans, of communicating his erudition
in a way not only comprehensible, but agreeable to
the laity. The Teutonic Gelehrte, gallantly
devoting a half-century to his pipe and his locative
case, fencing the result of his labors with a bristling
hedge of abbreviations, cross-references, and untranslated
citations that take panglottism for granted as an
ordinary incident of human culture, too hastily assumes
a tenacity of life on the part of his reader as great
as his own. All but those with whom the study
of language is a specialty pass him by as Dante does
Nimrod, gladly concluding
“Che cosi e a lui ciascun linguaggio,
Come il suo ad altrui, che a nullo e noto.”
