"'Forever sunny, forever blooming,
Nor cloud nor frost can touch that spot,
Where the happy people are ever roaming,
The bitter pangs of the past forgot.'
This is the Greek story of Elysion; these are the Elysian Fields of the
Egyptians; these are the Gardens of the Hesperides; this is the region
in the West to which the peasant of Brittany looks from the shores of
Cape Raz; this is Atlantis.
The starving child seeks to reach this blessed land in a boat and is drowned.
"High on the cliffs the light-house keeper
Caught the sound of a piercing scream;
Low in her hut the lonely widow
Moaned in the maze of a troubled dream;
"And saw in her sleep a seaman ghostly,
With sea-weeds clinging in his hair,
Into her room, all wet and dripping,
A drownéd boy on his bosom bear.
"Over Death Sea on a bridge of silver
The child to his Father's arms had passed!
Heaven was nearer than Tir-na-n'oge,
And the golden city was reached at last."
CHAPTER VIII.
THE OLDEST SON OF NOAH.
That eminent authority, Dr. Max Müller, says, in his "Lectures on the
Science of Religion,"
"If we confine ourselves to the Asiatic continent, with its important peninsula of Europe, we find that in the vast desert of drifting human speech three, and only three, oases have been formed in which, before the beginning of all history, language became permanent and traditional—assumed, in fact, a new character, a character totally different from the original character of the floating and constantly varying speech of human beings. These three oases of language are known by the name of Turanian, Aryan, and Semitic. In these three centres, more particularly in the Aryan and Semitic, language ceased to be natural; its growth was arrested, and it became permanent, solid, petrified, or, if you like, historical speech. I have always maintained that this centralization and traditional conservation of language could only have been the result of religious and political influences, and I now mean to show that we really have clear evidence of three independent settlements of religion—the Turanian, the Aryan, and the Semitic—concomitantly with the three great settlements of language."