Lastly, it remains to say that the stories of glass mountains ascended by knights are probably allegories of death--heaven being spoken of to this day by Russian and German peasants as a glass mountain. CHAPTER XII. PICTURE-WRITING. [Sidenote: Lateness of the discovery of letters.] Though it is true, as we have said before, that every manufactured article involves a long chapter of unwritten history to account for its present form, and the perfection of the material from which it is wrought, there is no one of them, not the most artistic, that will so well repay an effort to hunt it through its metamorphoses in the ages to its first starting-point, as will the letters that rapidly drop from our pen when we proceed to write its name. Each one of these is a manufactured article at which a long, long series of unknown artists have wrought, expanding, contracting, shaping, pruning, till at length, the result of centuries of effort, our alphabet stands clear--a little army of mute, unpretending signs, that are at once the least considered of our inherited riches--mere jots and tittles--and the spells by which all our great feats of genius are called into being. Does unwritten history or tradition tell us anything of the people to whose invention we owe them? or, on the other hand, can we persuade the little shapes with which we are familiar to so animate themselves, and give such an account of the stages by which they grew into their present likeness, as will help us to understand better than we did before the mental and social conditions of the times of their birth? One question, at least, they answer clearly--we know that while in their earliest forms they must have preceded the birth of History, they were the forerunners and heralds of his appearance, and if we are obliged to relegate their invention to the dark period of unrecorded events, we must place it at least in the last of the twilight hours, the one that preceded daybreak, for they come leading sunlight and certainty behind them. It will be hard if these revealers of other births should prove to be entirely silent about their own. Another point seems to grow clear as we think. As letters are the elements by which records come to us, it is not in records, or at least not in early records, that we must look for a history of their invention. Like all other tools, they will have lent themselves silently to the ends for which they were called into being. For a long, long time, they will have been too busy giving the history of their employers to tell us consciously anything about themselves. We must leave the substance of records, then, and look to their manner and form, if we would unravel the long story of the invention and growth of our alphabet; and as it is easiest to begin with the thing that is nearest to us, let us pause before one of our written words, and ask ourselves exactly what it is to us. [Sidenote: Writing the art of picturing sound.]