I sit now on a stump whose rings number
centuries of growth.
If I look around I see that the soil is
composed of the remains of just such stumps, ancestors to this.
The earth is covered with mould. I thrust this stick many aeons
deep into its surface, and with my heel make a deeper furrow than
the elements have ploughed here for a thousand years. If I
listen, I hear the peep of frogs which is older than the slime of
Egypt, and the distant drumming of a partridge on a log, as if it
were the pulse-beat of the summer air. I raise my fairest and
freshest flowers in the old mould. Why, what we would fain call
new is not skin deep; the earth is not yet stained by it. It is
not the fertile ground which we walk on, but the leaves which
flutter over our heads. The newest is but the oldest made
visible to our senses. When we dig up the soil from a thousand
feet below the surface, we call it new, and the plants which
spring from it; and when our vision pierces deeper into space,
and detects a remoter star, we call that new also. The place
where we sit is called Hudson, - once it was Nottingham, - once -
We should read history as little critically as we consider the
landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and
various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create,
than by its groundwork and composition.
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