1826.] f° 25) 
FAMILIARITIES.—NO. lV. 
Anonymous. 
—- 
Ques. What is your name ? 
Ans. N.or M. , 
—— 
Ir ‘has-been advanced in a philosophic stanza, by one who knew how 
much of the vaunted elevation of man over his competitors of the air, 
earth, and waters, is comprized in the attribute of speech, that “ words 
are things.” And, considering their various and universal effects, it 
is at least as safe a proposition to support as the doctrine of another 
and more orthodox asserter, who would have us believe that Mont 
Blanc is merely a lump of -imagination—a concentration of thoughts, 
or of the “stuff that dreams are made of”—a handful of nonentity ; 
and that Pompeii is nothing more nor less than an idea in ruins. Now 
whether Lord Byron or Bishop Berkeley may be said to have succeeded in 
loosening the gordian knot of philosophy, or whether that object remains 
to be accomplished by time and Mr. Coleridge, it is a fact as certain as the 
progress of uncertainty itself, that the word, whose uses and perversions I 
am about to discuss, can never become part and parcel of any known or un- 
known system of physics or metaphysics. It is neither a thing—according 
to the peer; nor nothing—as assumed by the prelate; neither a term 
referable to the discoveries of art or science, nor a name bestowed by 
Adam ‘on any thing God has made: yet it is at once universal and indi- 
vidual in its application and properties. It represents nothing—or every 
thing—in the material and immaterial worlds; while it unites in its 
signification the mockery and marvels, the shadows and solidity of both. 
It reveals to us the secret link between matter and mind—the inscrutable 
agency that impels the machinery of being. It possesses a substantive 
faculty, and requires not another word to be joined with it. The 
great arithmeticians of the earth would fail to estimate the infinite 
variety of causes and effects, of doubts and indecisions, of subtleties and 
“evasions, that follow in the train of this one word Anonymous, and 
constitute it the Lord High Chancellor of our language. As little 
could they number or appreciate the manifold blessings it includes— 
the outgrowings of feeling and fiction, the pleasantries that spring even 
out of pain, the changes and chances of our condition, the incidental 
frendships and communings with society, the hurried and unremembered 
symphonies that gladden us between the acts of life. The nine letters 
that compose it are emblematical of the nine Muses, but their dominion 
‘is more mysterious and unlimited ; they preside in their collective glory 
over that profound and indefinite class of things, that have been received 
and sanctified at the living font of nature, but whose clime and com- 
‘plexion have never been entered: in the-nomenclature of man. Its four 
~syllables«are wafted on. the four winds of heaven, and from the heart 
and centre of the universe it looks down in scorn upon the uncouth and 
incongruous designations of mankind—upon the distinctions of mere 
terms—and the eagerness with which we (most of us) hurry through 
the shaded and healthful seclusions of the world, to wither under the 
sultry: superfluity of a title, or experimentalize on the namelessness of a 
name. It is the untalked-of, unromantic thing of the hour, yet, as a living 
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