Men Seem Anxious To Accomplish An
Orderly Retreat Through The Centuries, Earnestly Rebuilding The
Works Behind, As They Are Battered Down By The Encroachments Of
Time; But While They Loiter, They And Their Works Both Fall A
Prey To The Arch Enemy.
History has neither the venerableness of
antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern.
It does as if it
would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might
with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and
then tell us, - when did burdock and plantain sprout first? It
has been so written for the most part, that the times it
describes are with remarkable propriety called _dark ages_. They
are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark
about them. 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.
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