Our own productions, though yielding to the ancient in arrangement, method, beauty of form, and freshness of illustration, are superior in truth, delicacy, and elevation of sentiment,--above all, in the recognition of that peculiar revelation, the Brotherhood of Man. Vain are eloquence and poetry, compared with this heaven-descended truth. Put in one scale that simple utterance, and in the other all the lore of antiquity, with its accumulating glosses and commentaries, and the latter will be light in the balance. Greek poetry has been likened to the song of the nightingale, as she sits in the rich, symmetrical crown of the palm-tree, trilling her thick-warbled notes; but these notes will not compare in sweetness with those teachings of charity which belong to our Christian inheritance. These things cannot be forgotten by the scholar. From the Past he may draw all it can contribute to the great end of life, human progress and happiness,--progress, without which happiness is vain. But he must close his soul to the hardening influence of that spirit, which is more to be dreaded, as it is enshrined in compositions of such commanding authority. "Sunk in Homer's mine, I lose my precious years, now soon to fail, Handling his gold; which, howsoe'er it shine, Proves dross, when balanced in the Christian scale."[162] [162] Cowper, Sonnet to John Johnson: Minor Poems. In the department of _philology_, kindred to that of the classics, our Scholar labored with similar success. Unlike Sir William Jones in genius, he was like this English scholar in the multitude of languages he embraced. Distance of time and space was forgotten, as he explored the far-off primeval Sanscrit,--the hieroglyphics of Egypt, now awakening from the mute repose of centuries,--the polite and learned tongues of ancient and modern Europe,--the languages of Mohammedanism,--the various dialects in the forests of North America, and in the sandal-groves of the Pacific,--only closing with a _lingua franca_ from an unlettered tribe on the coast of Africa, to which his attention was called during the illness which ended in death.