Attempt > Volume 3

226 THE ATTEMPT.
unknown lying on each side of this period, we have no lifetime to spare in which
to search it out. The greater part of it must remain for ever unknown to us ; and
without thinking of the whole wide globe, and the six thousand years of human
history which are all unexplored, we acknowledge ourselves completely baffled.
"We may try once again. To learn a language thoroughly is no uncommon at¬
tainment, and we may succeed iu that. We work steadily till the words and gram¬
mar are fixed in our memory, and the idiom flows from our tongue like native speech.
But, after all, we have barely skimmed the surface of the language ; if we have, even
casually, glanced into its depths, we have found embedded in it roots which strike
down into the very beginnings of things, words that lay before us whole pages of
history in a half intelligible cypher, mementoes of individual and national character,
snatches of old wisdom and old song ; and we feel that its fibres stretch out far be¬
yond our ken, knitting it, by a net-work of a thousand threads, to every language on
earth, and forming a labyrinth in which we stand utterly bewildered.
If we have failed to reach the end of subjects which relate chiefly to man, it
would be worse than foolish to dream of fathoming those which tell more directly of
God and his works. Besides, no branch of knowledge stands isolated, but each is
subtly interwoven with every other in the universe, so that each one of them has no
end, but in infinity.
The thought of this vastness has often well-nigh overwhelmed us. Sometimes,
as we have surmounted some rugged bit of cliif, and gaze on an immensity we had
not imagined before, we seem to hear a voice like thunder calling to us—back, you
who presume to tread the slopes of mountaius whose summits you can never gain,
back into your native ignorance and littleness. Faint and trembling we prepare to
submit to the mandate. But as we glance to our fellow-clamberers, we see that they
too have heard the cry, and that we do not shrink and falter alone. There are
millions on the same road, and these are not all like us—beginners and children in
knowledge. The scholar closes his book and weeps, the ardent discoverer stops in
mid-ocean, the astronomer dares not raise his dim eye to his telescope, for they all
know that the summit is as inaccessible to them as to the youngest child in the val¬
ley below.
We shout up the mountain-side, to some who have almost vanished on the far
height, " Do j^ou see the summit ?" and the voice floats down to us, " Each step
reveals to us peaks and ridges that we saw not before, and they are without number,
but the top reaches to heaven."
We discern grand figures far along the shores of time, and we say, surely they