n when he entered it. Rather than periods that decay and
sin might bring again, should one remember the wonderful history of the
natural world when the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
Rather should one read the record of the rain, it seems,--the story of
the weather some morning, cycles since, with the way the wind was
blowing written in the slanting drip of the rain-drops caught and
petrified on the old red sandstone,--marks of the Maker as he passed,
one day, a million years ago,--than decipher on the scroll of any
palimpsest, under the light-headed visions of an anchorite, some
half-erased ode of Anacreon.

But, after all, this veneration for the ancients--who personally might
be forgiven for their misfortune in having lived when the world was
young, were not one so slavish before them--is only because again one
looks at the ideal,--looks through that magical Claude Lorraine glass
which makes even the commonest landscape picturesque. We forget the
dirty days of straw-strewn floors, and see the leather hangings stamped
with gold; we forget the fearful feet of sandal shoon, but see the dust
of a Triumph rising in clouds of glory. We look at that past, feeling
something like gods, too.

"The gods are happy:
They turn on all sides
Their shining eyes,
And see, below them,
The earth and men."

We cannot consider those things happening remotely from us on the
earth's surface, even now, without suffering them to partake somewhat of
the property of by-gone days. It makes little difference whether the
distance be that of meridians or of eras. When at sunrise we fancy some
foreign friend beholding dawn upon the silver summits of the Alps, we
are forced directly to remember that with him day is at the noon, and
his sunrise has vanished with those of all the yesterdays,--so that even
our friend becomes a being of the past; or when, bathed in the mellow
air of an autumn afternoon, the sunshine falling on us like the light of
a happy smile, and all the vaporous vistas melting in clouded sapphire,
it occurs to us that possibly it is snowing on the Mackenzie River, and
night has already darkened down over the wide and awful
ice-fields,--then distance seems a paradox, and time and occasion mere
phantasmagoria; there are no beings but ourselves, there is no moment
but the present; all circumstance of the world becomes apparent to us
only like pictures thrown into the perspective of the past. It