Mardi could not stand long; have to annex one of the planets; invade the great sun; colonize the moon;—­conquerors sighed for new Mardis; and sages for heaven—­ having by heart all the primers here below.  Like us, ages back they groaned under their books; made bonfires of libraries, leaving ashes behind, mid which we reverentially grope for charred pages, forgetting we are so much wiser than they.—­But amazing times! astounding revelations; preternatural divulgings!—­How now?—­more wonderful than all our discoveries is this:  that they never were discovered before.  So simple, no doubt our ancestors overlooked them; intent on deeper things—­the deep things of the soul.  All we discover has been with us since the sun began to roll; and much we discover, is not worth the discovering.  We are children, climbing trees after birds’ nests, and making a great shout, whether we find eggs in them or no.  But where are our wings, which our fore-fathers surely had not?  Tell us, ye sages! something worth an archangel’s learning; 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.”