We Have Not Far To Seek For Living And
Unquestionable Evidence.
The very dust takes shape and confirms
some story which we had read.
As Fuller said, commenting on the
zeal of Camden, "A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate
still surviving out of which the city is run out." When Solon
endeavored to prove that Salamis had formerly belonged to the
Athenians, and not to the Megareans, he caused the tombs to be
opened, and showed that the inhabitants of Salamis turned the
faces of their dead to the same side with the Athenians, but the
Megareans to the opposite side. There they were to be
interrogated.
Some minds are as little logical or argumentative as nature; they
can offer no reason or "guess," but they exhibit the solemn and
incontrovertible fact. If a historical question arises, they
cause the tombs to be opened. Their silent and practical logic
convinces the reason and the understanding at the same time. Of
such sort is always the only pertinent question and the only
satisfactory reply.
Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and
as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens,
and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very
dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome, or Greece, Etruria,
or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?
The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which
beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there. Still hangs her
wrinkled trophy. And here too the poet's eye may still detect
the brazen nails which fastened Time's inscriptions, and if he
has the gift, decipher them by this clew. The walls that fence
our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon
itself, are all built of _ruins_. Here may be heard the din of
rivers, and ancient winds which have long since lost their names
sough through our woods; - the first faint sounds of spring, older
than the summer of Athenian glory, the titmouse lisping in the
wood, the jay's scream, and blue-bird's warble, and the hum of
"bees that fly
About the laughing blossoms of sallowy."
Here is the gray dawn for antiquity, and our to-morrow's future
should be at least paulo-post to theirs which we have put behind
us. There are the red-maple and birchen leaves, old runes which
are not yet deciphered; catkins, pine-cones, vines, oak-leaves,
and acorns; the very things themselves, and not their forms in
stone, - so much the more ancient and venerable. And even to the
current summer there has come down tradition of a hoary-headed
master of all art, who once filled every field and grove with
statues and god-like architecture, of every design which Greece
has lately copied; whose ruins are now mingled with the dust, and
not one block remains upon another. The century sun and
unwearied rain have wasted them, till not one fragment from that
quarry now exists; and poets perchance will feign that gods sent
down the material from heaven.
What though the traveller tell us of the ruins of Egypt, are we
so sick or idle, that we must sacrifice our America and to-day to
some man's ill-remembered and indolent story? Carnac and Luxor
are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert
sand, and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to
wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur. Carnac!
Carnac! here is Carnac for me. I behold the columns of a larger
and purer temple.
This is my Carnac, whose unmeasured dome
Shelters the measuring art and measurer's home.
Behold these flowers, let us be up with time,
Not dreaming of three thousand years ago,
Erect ourselves and let those columns lie,
Not stoop to raise a foil against the sky.
Where is the spirit of that time but in
This present day, perchance the present line?
Three thousand years ago are not agone,
They are still lingering in this summer morn,
And Memnon's Mother sprightly greets us now,
Wearing her youthful radiance on her brow.
If Carnac's columns still stand on the plain,
To enjoy our opportunities they remain.
In these parts dwelt the famous Sachem Pasaconaway, who was seen
by Gookin "at Pawtucket, when he was about one hundred and twenty
years old." He was reputed a wise man and a powwow, and
restrained his people from going to war with the English. They
believed "that he could make water burn, rocks move, and trees
dance, and metamorphose himself into a flaming man; that in
winter he could raise a green leaf out of the ashes of a dry one,
and produce a living snake from the skin of a dead one, and many
similar miracles." In 1660, according to Gookin, at a great feast
and dance, he made his farewell speech to his people, in which he
said, that as he was not likely to see them met together again,
he would leave them this word of advice, to take heed how they
quarrelled with their English neighbors, for though they might do
them much mischief at first, it would prove the means of their
own destruction. He himself, he said, had been as much an enemy
to the English at their first coming as any, and had used all his
arts to destroy them, or at least to prevent their settlement,
but could by no means effect it. Gookin thought that he
"possibly might have such a kind of spirit upon him as was upon
Balaam, who in xxiii. Numbers, 23, said `Surely, there is no
enchantment against Jacob, neither is there any divination
against Israel.'" His son Wannalancet carefully followed his
advice, and when Philip's War broke out, he withdrew his
followers to Penacook, now Concord in New Hampshire, from the
scene of the war. On his return afterwards, he visited the
minister of Chelmsford, and, as is stated in the history of that
town, "wished to know whether Chelmsford had suffered much during
the war; and being informed that it had not, and that God should
be thanked for it, Wannalancet replied, `Me next.'"
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