The parallel may be traced to almost any extent. Like the memory of our earliest years, so is the dawning history of a young world or nation, except so far as positive revelation has shed its light upon it. Both are _mythical_. In other words, facts are remembered, not as they are in themselves, but as seen through the magnifying and coloring influence of the emotional medium with which they are ever afterward associated. Like stars observed through a densely refracting atmosphere, they stand apart, each in its own seclusion, and hence they loom upon the vision without any of those mutually connecting associations that belong to our subsequent thinking. There is, too, in both cases, the same chronicler--the pure remembrance, a _tradition_ unaided by any of those outward helps that are afterward employed. At a later period more regular annals succeed this mythic handing down of isolated facts. The state has its formal remembrancer, its [Greek: syngrapheus], or historical _arranger_ of events in a _connected_ story, and in their mutual relations. Corresponding to this, then, arises in the individual that orderly habit of thinking which produces associations, having a similar effect in causing a stricter union between the outer and inner relations of the soul. Again, there are times when the man gets to himself what may be called an _artificial_ memory. He would change the natural flow of thought, and determine what he _will_ remember, and what he _ought_ to remember--forgetting that before he can effectually do this he must be changed himself in the innermost springs of his being. He studies mnemonics. He manufactures new laws of association. But this effort ever fails in the end. Nature will have her way. The old course of memory will return; and with it the spiritual history of the man will go on as before. So, too, the state or nation may have its artificial periods, and its systems of political mnemonics. The mythical, the epic, the heroic, and not only these, but the later, yet not less thrilling chronicles of stirring events that carried with them the whole heart of the national humanity, give way to statistics, and documents of trade, or tables of revenue, or in a word, to what are deemed the more important records of _political economy_. Here, too, there may be an attempt to change the course of nature, and make that to be history which never can be such, except at the expense of some of those attributes, which, although liable to great and dangerous perversions, are still the noblest parts of our humanity.