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. 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: -
"Fragments of the lofty strain
Float down the tide of years,
As buoyant on the stormy main
A parted wreck appears."
These are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and
progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived
at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a
thousand surmises shed some light on this story. We will not be
confined by historical, even geological periods which would allow
us to doubt of a progress in human affairs. If we rise above
this wisdom for the day, we shall expect that this morning of the
race, in which it has been supplied with the simplest necessaries,
with corn, and wine, and honey, and oil, and fire, and articulate
speech, and agricultural and other arts, reared up by degrees
from the condition of ants to men, will be succeeded by a day of
equally progressive splendor; that, in the lapse of the divine
periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist to
elevate the race as much above its present condition.
But we do not know much about it.
Thus did one voyageur waking dream, while his companion slumbered
on the bank. Suddenly a boatman's horn was heard echoing from
shore to shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer's
wife with whom he was to take his dinner, though in that place
only muskrats and kingfishers seemed to hear. The current of our
reflections and our slumbers being thus disturbed, we weighed
anchor once more.
As we proceeded on our way in the afternoon, the western bank
became lower, or receded farther from the channel in some places,
leaving a few trees only to fringe the water's edge; while the
eastern rose abruptly here and there into wooded hills fifty or
sixty feet high. The bass, _Tilia Americana_, also called the
lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water
with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of
small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade
for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the
material of the fisherman's matting, and the ropes and peasant's
shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of nets
and a coarse cloth in some places. According to poets, this was
once Philyra, one of the Oceanides. The ancients are said to
have used its bark for the roofs of cottages, for baskets, and
for a kind of paper called Philyra. They also made bucklers of
its wood, "on account of its flexibility, lightness, and
resiliency." It was once much used for carving, and is still in
demand for sounding-boards of piano-fortes and panels of
carriages, and for various uses for which toughness and
flexibility are required. Baskets and cradles are made of the
twigs. Its sap affords sugar, and the honey made from its
flowers is said to be preferred to any other.
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