A Discourse: Delivered Before the Virginia Historical Society, at Their Eighth Annual Meeting, December 14, 1854 (Classic Reprint)

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Excerpt from A Discourse: Delivered Before the Virginia Historical Society, at Their Eighth Annual Meeting, December 14, 1854Doubtless the wild man ofthe woods could distinguish between sounds, as pleasant or unpleasant, as grave or gay, but what sense had he ofthe hidden ha'rraonies which ¿oated in the air around him Did he dream that the very air which he breathed could be modulated into sounds which subdue the senses by their tones, and stir the soul to its inmost depths, speaking in the only universal language known to man, with an unerring concord and a certainty of expression which the original curse of Babel has never reached to confuse or destroy? So, too, he must have had some idea of the beautiful, in the forms ofthings, but it was as transitory as the lights and shadows which ¿itted by. Him. To fix the idea ere it fled, and reproduce it in forms more eloquent than words, to make sentient the cold impassive stone, and to embalm emotions and sentiments in lights borrowed from heaven, would have been indeed to him an art and a faculty divine, so far did it transcend his power of execution. Nor is the superiority of the last over the former generation of the men of whom I have been Speaking, less striking in a moral, than in a physical point of view. Conceptions over which a Newton, or a Leibnitz, or Bernouilli, or Euler, toiled in his study, are now the daily exercises of boys at college, and the higherand subtler analysis of La Grange, or La Place, -is probably destined to be mastered with equal facility hereafter. Ideas whose origination cost so much to a Plato, or an Aristotle, a Bacon, a Des Cartes, or a Kant, are now the' commonproperty of the world, and thousands understand thoughts which probably not one of them could have discovered.About the PublisherForgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.comThis book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully, any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.