For lips that speak a prophet's voice.

To me _the future_ thou has granted;
I miss the moment from the chain--
The happy present hour enchanted!
Take back thy gift again!"* [Bulwer's translation.]

These lines express more than the trite observation, that a knowledge
of futurity would prove a torment to the possessor. Beneath that
obvious is couched the deeper moral, which expresses the sufferings of
the philosophic prophet--of the man who, too much for his own quiet,
anticipates reasonings, conclusions, sentiments, forms of social life
yet to prevail--the man to whom not coming events, but coming ideas,
cast their shadows before. If we could suppose one at the time of the
crusades, educated to associate and sympathize with the choice spirits
of the age, yet anticipating the sense of their age, in making the
comparative estimate of chivalrous adventure, and successful
cultivation of the arts of peace and industry; he must have felt
somewhat like Cassandra among the less gifted. If we could look on
life, as our successors will two hundred years hence, we too might
complain of being "lone in the city of the blind;" unless large Hope
and Benevolence enabled us to live on the future. Thus we find
additional motive to desiring a united and absolute, rather than an
individual and relative progress, in the consideration that knowledge
most worthily so called--whoso increaseth greatly beyond the average
attainment, doth so to his own sorrow.

To complete the list of false estimates of good, refuted by one test,
we should allude to the frivolities of gentility and fashion-the
passion for wearing badges of distinction, however impotent or