de. But there are some things I
think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not unpatriotic
to mention them in this point of view as they come before us in so many
other aspects.

There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we
grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an
Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire
Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian
arrowheads. 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. It makes a man
human to live on these old humanized soils. He cannot help marching in
step with his kind in the rear of such a procession. They say a dead
man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them. There is nothing like the
dead cold hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us
into the solemn flow of the life of our race. Rousseau came out of one
of his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.

I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving railroad
village. The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses, the spacious
brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of youthful and leggy
trees before it, are exhilarating. They speak of progress, and the time
when there shall be a city, with a His Honor the Mayor, in the place of
their trim but