*
This is an age when genealogy has taken a new lease of
life, and become for the first time a human science; so
that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths,
but to trace out some of the secrets of descent and
destiny; and as we study, we think less of Sir Bernard
Burke and more of Mr. Galton. Not only do our character
and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
during generations; but the very plot of our life's story
unfolds itself on a scale of centuries, and the biography
of the man is only an episode in the epic of the family.
*
But our ancestral adventures are beyond even the arithmetic
of fancy; and it is the chief recommendation of long
pedigrees, that we can follow backward the careers of our
HOMUNCULUS and be reminded of our antenatal lives. Our
conscious years are but a moment in the history of the
elements that build us.
*
What is mine, then, and what am I? If not a curve in this
poor body of mine (which you love, and for the sake of
which you dotingly dream that you love me), not a gesture
that I can frame, not a tone of my voice, not a look from
my eyes, no, not even now when I speak to him I love, but
has belonged to others? Others, ages dead, have wooed
other men with my eyes; other men have heard the pleadings
of the same voice that now sounds in your ears. The hands
of the dead are in my bosom; they move me, they pluck me,
they guide me; I am a puppet at their command; and I but
re-inform features and attributes that have long been laid
aside from evil in the quiet of the grave.
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