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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from Louis Lambert by Honore de Balzac: presentment, from hieroglyphics to the alphabet, from the alphabet to
written language, of which the eloquent beauty resides in a series of
images, classified by rhetoric, and forming, in a sense, the
hieroglyphics of thought? Was it not the ancient mode of representing
human ideas as embodied in the forms of animals that gave rise to the
shapes of the first signs used in the East for writing down language?
Then has it not left its traces by tradition on our modern languages,
which have all seized some remnant of the primitive speech of nations,
a majestic and solemn tongue whose grandeur and solemnity decrease as
communities grow old; whose sonorous tones ring in the Hebrew Bible,
and still are noble in Greece, but grow weaker under the progress of
Louis Lambert |
