It is written as if the spectator should
be think
ing of the backside of the picture on the wall, or
as
if the
author expected the dead would be his readers, and wished
to detail to them their own experience .
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.
It 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 arcs.
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 rneet
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 lie 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.
But it is fit 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 day-light 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 eye and the sun from
the first.
The ages have not added a new ray to the one,
nor altered a fibre of the other.
T.
