Worcester daily spy. [volume] (Worcester [Mass.]) 1850-1888, 1857-08-29

tured by Messrs. Glass & Co. of London, for the
Atlantic telegraph company, to connect ST.
johns, Newfoundland, with Valencia, ireland,
distance of sixteen hundred and forty nautical, or
nine hundred statute miles" Does It seem all
but incredible to you that intelligence should
travel for two thousand miles, along these slen-
der copper wires, far down in the all but fathom-
less Atlantic, never before penetrated by aught
pertaining to humanity, save when some founder.
ing vessel has plunged with her hapless company
to the eternal silence and darkness Of the abyss
Does it seem, l say, all but miracle of art
that the thoughts of living men--the thoughts
that we think up here on the earth's surface in
the cheerful light of dsy-about the markets,
and the exchanges, and the seasons, and the elee-
TONS and the treaties, and the wars, and all the
fond nothings of daily life. should clothe them
selves with elemental sparks, and shoot with fiery
speed in moment. in the twinklng Of an eve,
from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among
the uncouth monsters that wallow in the neither
seas, along the wreck paved floor through the
oozy dungeons Of the rayless deep that the last
intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels
VIII IN few months be coquetting with the West
wind on these boundless prairies, should go laun.
ing along the Shiny decks of old sunken gale
ons, which have been rotting for ages; that mes
sages OF friendship and love, from warm living
oosoms, should burn over the cold green bones of
men and women, whose hearts, once warm
ours burst the eternal CULTS closed and roared
over them, centuries ago !; Behold another phe-
nomenon OF a surety not less surprising-an in
telleclual electrical telegraph-if l may so call
lt-not less marvellous. The little volume which
hold in my hand contains the two immortal
poems of Homer, those world renowned strains,
which one of the imperial minds of our race, not
far from thirty centuries ago, poured forth in the
delighted ears of heroic Greece, while the sofest
down of youth was upon the cheek of its young
NEUTRALITY-SUSPICIOUS. glowing golden legends-that
sovereign wrath of Achilles, which
" shall burn unquenehably,
Until the eternal doom shall be-"
1 the parting of Hector and Andromache--a scene
to which the sad experience Of three thousand
years could not add one image Of tenderness and
sorrow; the threats Of Jupiter to the awe-stTuck
gods, while every peak OF Olympus was ablaze
with his leaping thunders the piteous supplica
tons of aged Priam, kissing the hand and bath
ing with his tears the feet of the cruel chieftain,
who had dragged the torn body of his noble son
three times round the Ilian walls the weary and
sorrowful wanderings of Ulysses, which every
subsequent age of mankind has retraced with de-
light-these all, like the cunningly imprisoned
airs of musical box, breathe to us in one peren-
NAL strain of melody from within the covers of
this small volume. By the simple agency of
twenty four little marks stamped on the written
or the printed page, the immortal legend has
flashed down to us through the vicsstudes Of
empires and eras across the vast expanse of
enlightened and benighted periods Of history
from region to region, from his own rocky islet
in the Egean to shores unknown, undreamed of,
by him ;--beneath the overwhelming pillows OF
three thousand years, where peoples whole have
sunk; and it now binds together, by the golden
wires of intellect and taste, the mind of Europe
and America, at this meridian of their refinement,
with the mind of every intervening age of litera-
ry culture, back to the cradle of infant Greece.
And WHILE at our places of education, we dill
gently investigate the wonderful properties of
matter developed in the phenomena of the physi
cal world shall W ot my dpnO1
ton of our time and attention well bestowed up
on the miracles of the aoord written and spoken
the phenomena Of language, which lie at the
foundation of all intellectual improvement,
of all our literature and science in word, of all
rational communication between man and man