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Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 6, No. 34, August, 1860
The Project Gutenberg eBook, Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August,
1860, by Various
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Title: Atlantic Monthly Volume 6, No. 34, August, 1860
Author: Various
Release Date: February 12, 2004 [eBook #11061]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY VOLUME 6, NO. 34, AUGUST, 1860***
E-text prepared by Joshua Hutchinson, Tonya Allen, and Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders
THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. VI.--AUGUST, 1860.--NO. XXXIV.
THE CARNIVAL OF THE ROMANTIC.
Whither went the nine old Muses, daughters of Jupiter and the Goddess of Memory, after their seats on Helicon, Parnassus, and Olympus were barbarized? Not far away. They hovered like witches around the seething caldron of early Christian Europe, in which, "with bubble, bubble, toil and trouble," a new civilization was forming, mindful of the brilliant lineage of their worshippers, from Homer to Boethius, looking upon the vexed and beclouded Nature, and expecting the time when Humanity should gird itself anew with the beauty of ideas and institutions. They were sorrowful, but not in despair; for they knew that the children of men were strong with recuperative power.
The ear of Fancy, not long since, heard the hoofs of winged Pegasus striking the clouds. The long-idle Muses, it seemed, had bec