e more; each receiving all that
was known, and adding its own gain: the history and poetry of nations
are to be accumulative; each generation treasuring the history and the
songs of its ancestors, adding its own history and its own songs: and
the art of nations is to be accumulative, just as science and history
are; the work of living men is not superseding, but building itself
upon the work of the past. Nearly every great and intellectual race of
the world has produced, at every period of its career, an art with some
peculiar and precious character about it, wholly unattainable by any
other race, and at any other time; and the intention of Providence
concerning that art, is evidently that it should all grow together into
one mighty temple; the rough stones and the smooth all finding their
place, and rising, day by day, in richer and higher pinnacles to heaven.

74. Now, just fancy what a position the world, considered as one great
workroom--one great factory in the form of a globe--would have been in
by this time, if it had in the least understood this duty, or been
capable of it. Fancy what we should have had around us now, if, instead
of quarrelling and fighting over their work, the nations had aided each
other in their work, or if even in their conquests, instead of effacing
the memorials of those they succeeded and subdued, they had guarded the
spoils of their victories. Fancy what Europe would be now, if the
delicate statues and temples of the Greeks--if the broad roads and
massy walls of the Romans--if the noble and pathetic architecture of the
middle ages, had not been ground to dust by mere human rage. You talk of
the scythe of Time, and the tooth of Time: I tell you, Time is
scytheless and toothless; it is we who gnaw like the worm--we who smite
like the scythe. It is ourselves who abolish--ourselves who consume: we
are the mildew, and the flame; and the soul of man is to its own work as
the moth that frets when it cannot fly, and as the hidden flame that
blasts where it cannot illuminate. All these lost treasures of human
intellect have been wholly destroyed by human industry of destruction;
the marble would have stood its two thousand years as well in the
polished statue as in the Parian cliff; but we men have ground it to
powder, and mixed it with our own ashes. The walls and the ways would
have stood--it is we who have left not one stone upon another, and
restored its pathlessness to the desert; the great