BOOK III. 



ANTAEUS THE GMT, 

 CHAPTER I. 



"Man is all symmetry, 



Full of proportions, one limb to another, 

 And all to all the world besides. 



Each part may call the farthest brother : 

 For head with foot hath private amity ; 



And both, with moons and tides." HERBERT. 



THUS sing the birds of the heavens, and some " old poet's 

 grand imagination is imposed on us as adamantine and 

 everlasting truth, and God's own word !" Is it the man of 

 history, the man of the past, wrapped in the inarticulate 

 mutterings of fable, the man of the present hour, inten- 

 sated, pungent, and wickedly real, or the man of the future, 

 the ripened fruit of the ages, the possibly perfect man, 

 who, like the man of the past, is " made of such stuff as 

 dreams are made of," that the poets have thus embalmed in 

 the "amber of song?" 



Surely they do not describe with artistic accuracy the 

 skulking scavenger that now infests this planet, the mourn- 

 ful victim of disease and pain that now ghosts it through 

 the world, with heart devoured by the cares of a sensual 

 life, with a brain seethed by the fires of excitements that 

 never die, and a stomach which is a ghastly museum of all 

 the eccentric and heterogeneous forms of matter in exist- 

 ence, for " nothing has got so far, but man hath caught and 

 kept it as his prey." With this stomach, which the last 

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