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There might be some way of reducing what we feel from the Greeks, or Chinese, or Celts, into a word, a sentence; of writing it down even in a single hieroglyph, of which the elements would be such as should convey to something in us behind the intellect just the indefinable feeling either of these people give us.
Two Egyptian inscriptions have been found at Knossos, but no bilingual one. A list of Keftian names is preserved in the British Museum upon an Egyptian writing-board from Thebes with what is perhaps a copy of a single Cretan hieroglyph, a vase; but again, nothing bilingual.
In presence of a part of the Academy of Inscriptions, in an apartment wherein the name of hieroglyph has so often resounded, I cannot refrain from alluding to the service which Fourier rendered to science by retaining Champollion. The young professor of history of the Faculty of Letters of Grenoble had just attained the twentieth year of his age. Fate calls him to shoulder the musket.
But there are a set of amateurs of the Belies Lettres, the gay science, who come to me as a sort of rendezvous, putting questions of criticism, of British Institutions, Lalla Rookhs, etc., what Coleridge said at the lecture last night, who have the form of reading men, but, for any possible use reading can be to them but to talk of, might as well have been Ante-Cadmeans born, or have lain sucking out the sense of an Egyptian hieroglyph as long as the pyramids will last, before they should find it.
That severed, broken, or destroyed, and man is an alien and an orphan; lost to him forever is the key to all spiritual mystery, to the hieroglyph of the soul, to the symbolism of nature, of time, and of eternity. Such, as we understand it, is Carlyle's teaching. But this is not all.
The Mark of the Man would have disappeared from history. It was I who with a masterful hand seized the chisel and carved the hieroglyph complete and perfect. I clutched the trembling hand of Destiny when it was about to make a dull square four and forced it to make a nice curly five. Why, but for me the Cosmos would have lost a coincidence!"
Back in that twilight of history of which the later tale could be told only by some symbol, some legendary hieroglyph, there was already an "Ark" by which the faithful few could be saved from the "Flood." The symbol became permanent. The Ark of the Covenant the sign of a great spiritual understanding remained as a token to man that in God he had a sure refuge.
You'd be utterly helpless, mentally, without your moustache. . . . When are we to take up our Etruscan symbols again? or was it Evans's monograph we were laboriously dissecting? Certainly it was; don't you remember the Hittite hieroglyph of Jerabis? and how you and I fought over those wretched floral symbols? You don't? And it was only a week ago? . . . And listen!
Involuntarily I seized his hand; my father pressed it convulsively, and said with a deep breath: "It was too late; Trevanion was Lady Ellinor's accepted, plighted, happy lover. My dear Katherine, I do not envy him now; look up, sweet wife, look up!" . The anaglyph was peculiar to the Egyptian priests; the hieroglyph generally known to the well educated. . Lucian, The Dream of Micyllus.
It should be photographed, because, to my certain knowledge, Mayer's drawing gives the year, above the figure of the sun which indicates the date of the calendar, quite wrongly; and yet, presuming on his own accuracy, he accuses another writer of leaving out the hieroglyph of the winter solstice.
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