From This September Afternoon, And
From Between These Now Cultivated Shores, Those Times Seemed More
Remote Than The Dark Ages.
On beholding an old picture of
Concord, as it appeared but seventy-five years ago, with a fair
open
Prospect and a light on trees and river, as if it were broad
noon, I find that I had not thought the sun shone in those days,
or that men lived in broad daylight then. Still less do we
imagine the sun shining on hill and valley during Philip's war,
on the war-path of Church or Philip, or later of Lovewell or
Paugus, with serene summer weather, but they must have lived and
fought in a dim twilight or night.
The age of the world is great enough for our imaginations, even
according to the Mosaic account, without borrowing any years from
the geologist. From Adam and Eve at one leap sheer down to the
deluge, and then through the ancient monarchies, through Babylon
and Thebes, Brahma and Abraham, to Greece and the Argonauts;
whence we might start again with Orpheus and the Trojan war, the
Pyramids and the Olympic games, and Homer and Athens, for our
stages; and after a breathing space at the building of Rome,
continue our journey down through Odin and Christ to - America.
It is a wearisome while. And yet the lives of but sixty old
women, such as live under the hill, say of a century each, strung
together, are sufficient to reach over the whole ground. Taking
hold of hands they would span the interval from Eve to my own
mother. A respectable tea-party merely, - whose gossip would be
Universal History. The fourth old woman from myself suckled
Columbus, - the ninth was nurse to the Norman Conqueror, - the
nineteenth was the Virgin Mary, - the twenty-fourth the Cumaean
Sibyl, - the thirtieth was at the Trojan war and Helen her
name, - the thirty-eighth was Queen Semiramis, - the sixtieth was
Eve the mother of mankind. So much for the
"Old woman that lives under the hill,
And if she's not gone she lives there still."
It will not take a very great-granddaughter of hers to be in at
the death of Time.
We can never safely exceed the actual facts in our narratives.
Of pure invention, such as some suppose, there is no instance.
To write a true work of fiction even, is only to take leisure and
liberty to describe some things more exactly as they are. A true
account of the actual is the rarest poetry, for common sense
always takes a hasty and superficial view. Though I am not much
acquainted with the works of Goethe, I should say that it was one
of his chief excellences as a writer, that he was satisfied with
giving an exact description of things as they appeared to him,
and their effect upon him. Most travellers have not self-respect
enough to do this simply, and make objects and events stand
around them as the centre, but still imagine more favorable
positions and relations than the actual ones, and so we get no
valuable report from them at all.
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