Chapter 72 - Page 2

discover, ye
discoverers, something new. Fools, fools! Mardi's not changed: the sun
yet rises in its old place in the East; all things go on in the same
old way; we cut our eye-teeth just as late as they did, three thousand
years ago."

"Your pardon," said Mohi, "for beshrew me, they are not yet all cut.
At threescore and ten, here have I a new tooth coming now."

"Old man! it but clears the way for another. The teeth sown by the
alphabet-founder, were eye-teeth, not yet all sprung from the soil.
Like spring-wheat, blade by blade, they break ground late; like
spring-wheat, many seeds have perished in the hard winter glebe. Oh,
my lord! though we galvanize corpses into St. Vitus' dances, we raise
not the dead from their graves! Though we have discovered the
circulation of the blood, men die as of yore; oxen graze, sheep
bleat, babies bawl, asses bray--loud and lusty as the day before the
flood. Men fight and make up; repent and go at it; feast and starve;
laugh and weep; pray and curse; cheat, chaffer, trick, truckle, cozen,
defraud, fib, lie, beg, borrow, steal, hang, drown--as in the laughing
and weeping, tricking and truckling, hanging and drowning times that
have been. Nothing changes, though much be new-fashioned: new fashions
but revivals of things previous. In the books of the past we learn
naught but of the present; in those of the present, the past. All
Mardi's history--beginning middle, and finis--was written out in
capitals in the first page penned. The whole story is told in a title-
page. An exclamation point is entire Mardi's autobiography."

"Who speaks now?" said Media, Bardianna, Azzageddi, or Babbalanja?"

"All three: is it not a pleasant concert?"

"Very fine: very fine.--Go on; and tell us something of the future."

"I have never departed this life yet, my lord."

"But just now you said you were risen from the dead." "From the buried
dead within me; not from myself, my lord."

"If you, then, know nothing of the future--did Bardianna?"

"If he did, naught did he reveal. I have ever observed, my lord, that
even in their deepest lucubrations, the profoundest, frankest,
ponderers always reserve a vast deal of precious thought for their own
private behoof. They think, perhaps, that 'tis too good, or too bad;
too wise, or too foolish, for the multitude. And this unpleasant
vibration is ever consequent upon striking a new vein of ideas in the
soul. As with buried treasures, the ground over them sounds strange
and hollow. At any rate, the profoundest ponderer seldom tells us all
he thinks; seldom reveals to us the ultimate, and the innermost;
seldom