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We wander from hall to hall, up stairs and down stairs. Along the shelves, behind them and round about, stand books, those petrifactions of the mind, which might again be vivified by spirit. Here lives a kind-hearted and mild old man, the librarian, Professor Schröder.
"That's true enough," replied the Indian, who had often wondered at the petrifactions with which the banks of the White River abound. "But the water that falls down here is quite clear," urged Lucien, holding his torch close to a natural basin. "But, nevertheless, it contains salts of lime in solution, the same, in fact, as all water, particularly that from wells.
It may now be proper to examine this subject, not with a view to explain all those petrifactions of bodies which is performed in the mineral regions of the earth, those regions that are inaccessible to man, but to show that what has been wrote by naturalists, upon this subject, has only a tendency to corrupt science, by admitting the grossest supposition in place of just principle or truth, and to darken natural history by introducing an ill conceived theory in place of matter of fact.
Oh, hang it! put it in your pocket;" and the imperative necessity for talking, and fancying what was adverse to fact, enabled him to feel for a time as if he had really acted according to the prompting of his wisdom. It amazed him to see people sitting and listening. The more he tried it, the more unendurable it became. Those sitters and loungers appeared like absurd petrifactions to him.
There is no use in revolutions till we have it; and as for empirical institutions, mankind has seen the best of them; we are perishing in their decay, dying piecemeal, going off into a race of ostriches, or something of that nature or threatened with becoming mere petrifactions, mineral specimens of what we have been, preserved, perhaps, to adorn the museums of some future species, gifted with better faculties for maintaining itself.
The name of Frederic Francis Chopin is so closely linked in the minds of musical students with that of Schumann in that art renaissance which took place almost simultaneously in France and Germany, when so many daring and original minds broke loose from the petrifactions of custom and tradition, that we shall not venture to separate them here.
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