Europe has neither the
titanic and Cyclopean masonry of the ancients, nor even its parchments,
to preserve the records of its "existing arts and languages." Its
civilization is too recent, too rapidly growing, to leave any positively
indestructible relics of either its architecture, arts or sciences.
What is there in the whole Europe that could be regarded as even
approximately indestructible, without mentioning the debacle of the
geological upheaval that follows generally such cataclysms? Is it its
ephemeral Crystal Palaces, its theatres, railways, modern fragile
furniture: or its electric telegraphs, phonographs, telephones, and
micrographs? While each of the former is at the mercy of fire and
cyclone, the last enumerated marvels of modern science can be destroyed
by a child breaking them to atoms. When we know of the destruction of
the "Seven World's Wonders," of Thebes, Tyre, the Labyrinth, and the
Egyptian pyramids and temples and giant palaces, as we now see slowly
crumbling into the dust of the deserts, being reduced to atoms by the
hand of Time--lighter and far more merciful than any cataclysm--the
question seems to us rather the outcome of modern pride than of stern
reasoning.
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