human occupancy, turning the desert
into a neglected garden, is necessary to give emotional colour and the
substance of thought; some touch of man's hand that knows a writing
beyond nature's can add what centuries could not give, and makes a rock
a monument. The Mediterranean islet is older for the pirate tower that
caps it, and for us the ivied church, with its shadowed graves, makes
England ancestral soil. Nor is it only such landmarks of time that bring
this obscure awe; occupations, especially, awake it, and customary
ceremonies, and all that enters into the external tradition of life,
handed down from generation to generation. On the Western prairies I
have felt rather the permanence of human toil than the newness of the
land.

"The sense of age in man's life, relieved, as it is, on the seeming
agelessness of nature, is a meditation on death, deep-set far below
thought. We behold the sensible conquests of death, and the sight is so
habitual, and remains so mysterious, that it leaves its imprint less in
the conscious and reflective mind than in temperament, sentiment,
imagination, and their hidden stir; the pyramids then seem fossils of
mankind; Stonehenge, Indian mounds, and desolate cities are like broken
anchors caught in the sunken reef and dull ooze of time's ocean, lost
relics of their human charge long vanished away. Startling it is, when
the finger of time has touched what we thought living, and we find in
some solitary place the face of stone. I learned this lesson on the low
marshes of Ravenna, where, among the rice-fields and the thousands of
white pond lilies, stands a lonely cathedral, from whose ruined sides
Christianity, in the face and figure it wore before it put on the form
and garb of a world-wide religion, looked down on me with the unknown
eyes of an alien and Oriental faith. 'Stranger, why lingerest thou in
this broken tomb,' I seemed to hear from silent voices in that death of
time; and still, when my thoughts seek the Mother-Church of Christendom,
they go, not to St. John Lateran by the Roman wall, but are pilgrims to
the low marshes, the white water lilies, the lone Byzantine ruin that
even the sea has long abandoned.

"The Mother-Church?--is then this personal religious life only a state
of orphanage? Because true life necessarily begins in the independent
self, must it continue without the sheltering of the traditional past,
the instructed guidance of older wisdom, and man's joint life in