No More Learning

Religious feelings were fostered by visions and dreams; marvellous
shapes to which savage man ascribed supernatural powers. Recurrent
appearances of such shapes induced a belief in their continuous
existence: so arose the notion of gods that live for ever.

Our navigation, tillage, walls, and laws,
Our armour, roads, and dress, and such-like boons,
And every elegance of modern life,
Poems and pictures, statues deftly wrought,
All these men learned with slow advancing steps
From practice and the knowledge won by wit.
So by degrees time brings each thing to sight,
And reason raiseth it to realms of day.
In arts must one thing, then another, shine,
Until they win their full development.


FOOTNOTES:

[V] To the Roman poet Titus Corus Lucretius (99-55 B. C. )
belongs the distinction of having made Epicureanism epic. Possessed by
a desire to free his fellow men from the trammels of superstition and
the dread of death, he composed his poem, "On the Nature of Things. "
His reasonings were based on the atomic theory, which the Greek
Epicurus had taken as the physical side of his system. In natural
law Lucretius found the true antidote to superstition, and from a
materialistic hypothesis of atoms and void he deduced everything.
Against the futilities of myth-religion he protested with the fervour
of an evangelist. On the ethical side, he accepted from Epicurus
the conception that the ideal lies in pleasure--not wild, sensual
pleasure, but that calm of mind which comes from temperate and refined
enjoyment, subdual of extravagant passion, and avoidance of political
entanglements. It is appropriate that the life of this apostle of
scientific quietism should be involved in obscurity. The story of his
insanity, so beautifully treated by Tennyson, may or may not be true.
It is hardly credible that a work so closely reasoned was, as a whole,
composed in lucid intervals between fits of madness; but, on the other
hand, there are signs of flagging in the later portions, and the work
comes to a sudden conclusion. The translations are specially made by
Prof. J. Wight Duff, and include a few extracts from his "Literary
History of Rome. "




JAMES MACPHERSON




Ossian[W]


_I. --Carthon_

A tale of the times of old--the deeds of days of other years.

Who comes from the land of strangers, with his thousands around him?
The sunbeam pours its bright stream before him; his hair meets the wind
of his hills. His face is settled from war. He is calm as the evening
beam that looks, from the cloud of the west, on Cona's silent vale. Who
is it but Fingal, the king of mighty deeds! The feast is spread around;
the night passed away in joy.


"Tell," said the mighty Fingal to Clessammor, "the tale of thy youthful
days. Let us hear the sorrow of thy youth, and the darkness of thy
days. "

"It was in the days of peace," replied the great Clessammor. "I came in
my bounding ship to Balclutha's walls of towers.