With such
expense of time and natural forces are our very paving-stones
produced. They teach us lessons, these dumb workers; verily
there are "sermons in stones, and books in the running streams."
In these very holes the Indians hid their provisions; but now
there is no bread, but only its old neighbor stones at the
bottom. Who knows how many races they have served thus? By as
simple a law, some accidental by-law, perchance, our system
itself was made ready for its inhabitants.
These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of
human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the
gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are
now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The
murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores,
and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the
Indian.
The fact that Romans once inhabited her reflects no little
dignity on Nature herself; that from some particular hill the
Roman once looked out on the sea. She need not be ashamed of the
vestiges of her children. How gladly the antiquary informs us
that their vessels penetrated into this frith, or up that river
of some remote isle! Their military monuments still remain on
the hills and under the sod of the valleys. The oft-repeated
Roman story is written in still legible characters in every
quarter of the Old World, and but to-day, perchance, a new coin
is dug up whose inscription repeats and confirms their fame.
Some "_Judaea Capta_" with a woman mourning under a palm-tree,
with silent argument and demonstration confirms the pages of
history.
"Rome living was the world's sole ornament;
And dead is now the world's sole monument.
. . . . .
With her own weight down pressed now she lies,
And by her heaps her hugeness testifies."
If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a
fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the
walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the
shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were
suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and
unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms
some story which we had read. As Fuller said, commenting on the
zeal of Camden, "A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate
still surviving out of which the city is run out." When Solon
endeavored to prove that Salamis had formerly belonged to the
Athenians, and not to the Megareans, he caused the tombs to be
opened, and showed that the inhabitants of Salamis turned the
faces of their dead to the same side with the Athenians, but the
Megareans to the opposite side.
