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.
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