——Till, o'er the wreck, emerging from the storm,
Immortal Nature lifts her changeful form;
Mounts from her funeral pyre on wings of flame,
And soars, and shines,—another, and the same.”
Such are the benefits resulting from that happiest of all inventions, which we may be said to owe to our sense of Hearing,—if, indeed, it be an invention of man, and not rather, as many have thought, a coeval power, bestowed on him by his provident Creator at the very moment which gave him life. But still, whether original or invented, the ear must equally have been its primary recipient. We have seen, in the view which we have taken of it, that of our more social intercourse it constitutes the chief delight,—giving happiness to hours, the wearying heaviness of which must otherwise have rendered existence an insupportable burthen; and that, in its more important character, as fixed, in the imperishable records which are transmitted, in uninterrupted progression, from the generation which passes away to the generation that succeeds, it gives to the individual man, the product of all the creative energies of mankind; extending, even to the humblest intellect, which can still mix itself with the illustrious dead, that privilege, which has been poetically allotted to the immortality of genius, of being “the citizen of every country, and the contemporary of every age.”
Footnotes
[74] Gray de Principiis Cogitandi, Lib. I. v. 130–134.
[75] Gray on the Pleasure arising from Vicissitude, Stanza I.—In v. i. the original has, instead of “in vain,” “now.”
[76] Reid's Inquiry into the Human Mind, c. iv. sect. 1.
[77] Pharsalia, lib. vii. v. 207—213.