Inhaltsangabe
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated.1876 Excerpt: ... SECOND DIVISION.--THE CRADLE. The entrance of great men into the world's history is wont to gather round it clouds of mystery. As manifestations of towering grandeur which mock at all endeavours to explain them by the cognizable forces and self-repeating cycles of their age and their surroundings, they do constitute a real mystery, which merges in its turn into the unsolved riddle of universal being and growth. But to the mystery of the reality is added the mystery of the imagination, as often as the restless impulse of the human mind to seek and find solutions, attempts by dint of surmising and pondering, by dint of thinking and picturing, to fathom the ground of the original reality. The warmer the love, the deeper the earnest of the effort, the richer the result which will be won, and the more secure its possession. The knowledge thus presumedly gained becomes indissolubly blent with the reality itself; the interpretation proclaims itself as simply the reality laid bare, made manifest. The fact itself of course always remains, after all, what it was, in its una ttained sublimity; it smiles at human endeavour; now commending the good intention which the picture shows, now praising its fine sense, now blaming the sensuousness that mars it, but deploring almost always not only the confusion of fact with the figure, but also the loss of the unsophisticated truth's original simplicity. It is notorious enough how this primitive philosophy of history, with its poetic afterthoughts, has garlanded the birth of great kings and generals, sages and founders of religion, with the most luxuriant legendary wreaths of divine descent, flaming signs from heaven, and miraculous escapes, until the original handwriting of history is so overhung with flowery forest-growth as ...
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