Men fought and conquer'd; lost and won.
Whole tribes and races, gone like last year's snow,
Have found the Eternal Hunting-Grounds, and run
The fiery gauntlet of their active days,
Till few are left to tell the mournful tale:
And these inspire us with such wild amaze
They seem like spectres passing down a vale
Steep'd in uncertain moonlight, on their way
Towards some bourn where darkness blinds the day,
And night is wrapp'd in mystery profound.
We cannot lift the mantle of the past:
We seem to wander over hallow'd ground:
We scan the trail of Thought, but all is overcast.

THERE WAS A TIME--and that is all we know!
No record lives of their ensanguin'd deeds:
The past seems palsied with some giant blow,
And grows the more obscure on what it feeds.
A rotted fragment of a human leaf;
A few stray skulls; a heap of human bones!
These are the records--the traditions brief--
'Twere easier far to read the speechless stones.
The fierce Ojibwas, with tornado force,
Striking white terror to the hearts of braves!
The mighty Hurons, rolling on their course,
Compact and steady as the ocean waves!
The fiery Iroquois, a warrior host!
Who were they?--Whence?--And why? no human tongue can boast!

XCII. MORALS AND CHARACTER IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

GOLDWIN SMITH.--1823-

_From_ COWPER.

The world into which Cowper came was one very adverse to him, and at the
same time very much in need of him. It was a world from which the spirit
of poetry seemed to have fled. There could be no stronger proof of this
than the occupation of the throne of Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton,
by the arch-versifier Pope. The Revolution of 1688 was glorious, but
unlike the Puritan Revolution which it followed, and in the political
sphere partly ratified, it was profoundly prosaic. Spiritual religion,
the source of Puritan grandeur and of the poetry of Milton, was almost
extinct; there was not much more of it among the Nonconformists, who had
now become to a great extent mere Whigs, with a decided Unitarian
tendency. The Church was little better than a political force cultivated
and manipulated by political leaders for their own purposes. The Bishops
were either politicians, or theological polemics collecting trophies of
victory over free-thinkers as titles to higher preferment. The inferior