I am not savage—I am serene. Set the Literature of the day aside altogether—and tell me if you think our conversation since dinner would not have been thought dull by many not altogether uneducated persons, who pride themselves not a little on their intellectuality and on their full participation in the Spirit of the Age?
TALBOYS.
Our conversation since dinner DULL!! No—no—no. Many poor creatures, indeed, there are among them—even among those of them who work the Press—pigmies with pap feeding a Giant who sneezes them away when sick of them into small offices in the Customs or Excise;—but not one of our privileged brethren of the Guild—with a true ticket to show—but would have been delighted with such dialogue—but would be delighted with its continuation—and thankful to know that he, "a wiser and a better man, will rise to-morrow morn."
SEWARD.
Do, my dear sir—resume your discoursing about those Greeks.
NORTH.
I was about to say, Seward, that those shrewd and just observers, and at the same time delicate thinkers, the ancient Greeks, did, as you well know, snatch from amongst the ordinary processes which Nature pursues, in respect of inferior animal life, a singularly beautiful Type or Emblem, expressively imaging to Fancy that bursting disclosure of Life from the bosom of Death, which is implied in the extrication of the soul from its corporeal prison, when this astonishing change is highly, ardently, and joyfully contemplated. Those old festal religionists—who carried into the solemnities of their worship the buoyant gladsomeness of their own sprightly and fervid secular life, and contrived to invest even the artful splendour and passionate human interest of their dramatic representations with the name and character of a sacred ceremony—found for that soaring and refulgent escape of a spirit from the dungeon and chains of the flesh, into its native celestial day, a fine and touching similitude in the liberation of a beautiful Insect, the gorgeously-winged, aérial Butterfly, from the living tomb in which Nature has, during a season, eased and urned its torpid and death-like repose.
SEWARD.
Nor, my dear sir, was this life-conscious penetration or intuition of a keen and kindling intelligence into the dreadful, the desolate, the cloud-covered Future, the casual thought of adventuring Genius, transmitted in some happier verse only, or in some gracious and visible poesy of a fine chisel; but the Symbol and the Thing symbolised were so bound together in the understanding of the nation, that in the Greek language the name borne by the Insect and the name designating the Soul is one and the same—ΨΥΧΗ.
NORTH.