It
has been so written for the most part, that the times it
describes are with remarkable propriety called _dark ages_. They
are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark
about them. The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust
and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which
implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize
it. As when we read in the history of the Saxons that Edwin of
Northumbria "caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he
had seen a clear spring," and "brazen dishes were chained to them
to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself
experienced." This is worth all Arthur's twelve battles.
"Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day:
Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay."
Than fifty years of Europe better one New England ray!
Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be
autobiography. Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go
abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain
him. If I am not I, who will be?
But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness
is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition.
