Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows? who
cares? There is no history to the red race,--there is hardly an
individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk--there
is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all
red ants. So, the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life
that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our
southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe or
fly in; he meets
"A vast vacuity! all unawares,
Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep."
But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of ancient
civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still standing in
the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's bones, and
beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of the Caesars. In
Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of yesterday,--Rome, under
her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as we contemplate her in the
shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or Volterra.
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