It Is Not
A Distance Of Time, But A Distance Of Relation, Which Makes Thus
Dusky Its Memorials.
What is near to the heart of this
generation is fair and bright still.
Greece lies outspread fair
and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and
daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to
forget that the sun shone, - nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon. Yet
no era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to
the historian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light.
If we could pierce the obscurity of those remote years, we should
find it light enough; only _there_ is not our day. Some
creatures are made to see in the dark. There has always been the
same amount of light in the world. The new and missing stars,
the comets and eclipses, do not affect the general illumination,
for only our glasses appreciate them. The eyes of the oldest
fossil remains, they tell us, indicate that the same laws of
light prevailed then as now. Always the laws of light are the
same, but the modes and degrees of seeing vary. The gods are
partial to no era, but steadily shines their light in the
heavens, while the eye of the beholder is turned to stone. There
was but the sun and the eye from the first. The ages have not
added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.
If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies,
those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak,
the world's inheritance, still reflecting some of their original
splendor, like the fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the
departed sun; reaching into the latest summer day, and allying
this hour to the morning of creation; as the poet sings:
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