MARGARET had no objection to Orpheus as crowning an age; she liked that multitudes should produce one. CHARLES WHEELER said that Carlyle had spoken of Orpheus as standing in such a relation to the Greeks as Odin bore to the Scandinavians. MARGARET said at this point (I don’t see with what pertinency) that Carlyle displeased her by making so much of mere men. JAMES CLARKE quoted Milton, speaking of himself among the revellers of the Stuart Court, as like Orpheus among the Bacchanals. I said that Bode placed Homer in the tenth century before Christ, and Orpheus in the age just preceding, say the thirteenth century before. MR. MACK thought all that mere conjecture. I told him it made a good deal of difference to me whether the Orphic Mythology came before or after that of Homer. Had man grown out of the noble and into the base idea? Was all our knowledge only memory? Had the Orphic fancies no beauty till the Platonic Christians shaped them? MARGARET responded to what I said, that she did not like a mind always looking back. E. P. P. said there was a great deal of consolation in it. Memory was prophecy. She didn’t like such a mind, but since she happened to have it she wanted support for it. MR. MACK said all history offered such support. CHARLES WHEELER didn’t like to believe it, but felt that he must. He spoke of the Golden Age. MARGARET said every nation looked back to this; but, after all, it was only the ideal. The past was a curtain on which they embroidered their pictures of the present. WILLIAM WHITE said that all great men looked to the appreciation of the future. We are too near to the present. MARGARET agreed. E. P. P. said, all the science of Europe could not offer anything like the old Egyptian lore. MARGARET said the moderns needed the assistance of a despotic government. CHARLES WHEELER spoke of the monuments in Central America; but before he could utter what was in his mind, MARGARET interrupted, saying that all the greatness of the Mexicans only sufficed to show their littleness. We might have lost in grandeur and piety, but we had gained in a thousand tag-rag ways. MRS. FARRAR whispered to me, “Write that down!” and I have done it. CHARLES WHEELER said that late discoveries proved that there was a complete knowledge of electricity among the ancients. There were lightning-rods on the temple at Jerusalem, and they are described by Josephus, who however does not know what they are. MARGARET and I clung to the “tag-rag” gain. CHARLES WHEELER agreed with me in thinking the Orphic Hymns of very late origin. MARGARET could not see the use of creating a race of giants to prepare the earth for pygmies! If these must exist, why not in some other sphere? She referred to the beautiful Persian fable. The _first_ was God, of course; since man may always revert to Him, what matter about the giants? I said that primitive ages were supposed to be innocent rather than great.