492 THE MOUNTAIN. 



waning fancies of departed races, but a living and abiding 

 conviction and trust, that the world is still in the rosy light 

 of its dawn ; that the "days of inspiration" are not passed; 

 that the wise man who exclaimed, in anguish, "I have lost a 

 day!" was a "king without a crown;" that the world is 

 really not faded, spent, and gone into dotage, and near its 

 final deliration. This flimsy garment of a theory is only a 

 fact, so far as nature indorses it, and no farther. 



In medicine, as in other departments of knowledge, it is, 

 and ever has been, that " Genius is always sufficiently the 

 enemy of genius by over-influence." The word of the in- 

 spired man, instead of becoming warm life-blood in the veins, 

 or growing seed in the soil, has always hardened into a 

 fossil, and made a stumbling-stone for long ages to come. 

 Shakspeare is born, and having scaled the heavens of poetry, 

 henceforward, the riders of Pegassus must hobble the celes- 

 tial steed with his yoke, having first constituted him the 

 great ideal artist in the realms of imagination and fairie. 

 Hunter, Stahl, and Broussais are born, and the human race 

 bleed rivers of blood for ages, the world having resolved 

 itself into a hospital for the cure of inflammations alone 

 phlogiston (<f>koYiaroq) being their sole morbific power under 

 the plenary inspiration of the " Fundamental Principles of 

 Inflammation," and the divine aegis of " Physiological Medi- 

 cine." Each age, in superstitious veneration, turns its eyes 

 to the past, and being sorrowfully indigent in the possessions 

 of the present, it contents itself by magnifying the claims of 

 the dead, and reciting with veneration the record of their 

 achievements. Each of its new books is but a votive leaf 

 on the altar of the "worship of genius." Still lingering 

 around the fires of departed worlds, it would " roast its eggs 

 with the cinders of extinct volcanoes." With its eye fixed 

 on the distant mountain-tops of the past, it hopes for the 

 dawn there " when it is really sunset, and night is coming 

 fast." With mournful assiduity it stirs the dead embers of 

 lights gone by, having hopes of illumination and heat, when 

 life has departed and death has come. It hangs with devo- 



