Old World

“ It can be only with horror that we reflect that the Old World was called upon also to furnish us a people to replace the more than half-million dead of as grand a population as the world ever knew, the flower of America, North, South, East, and West. ”

“ The Old World has receded far away; years, decades have passed, dropping their burden of oblivion on all that was, and especially on what was acrid and fiery in the past. It is a return to nature in which she seems to have cast out devils. ”

“ They left behind an entire town which is a work of art, in its way as charming and as nearly perfect as anything in the Old World, and utterly different from anything in the Old World—a unique expression. ”

“ Beneath the mouldering forms of the old world a new world was bursting into life; if the fifteenth century was an age of death it was an age of birth as well, of that new birth, that Renascence, from which the after life of Europe was to flow. ”

“ Abroad, a building of the eighth or tenth century stands ruinous in the open street; the children play round it, the peasants heap their corn in it, the buildings of yesterday nestle about it, and fit their new stones into its rents, and tremble in sympathy as it trembles. No one wonders at it, or thinks of it as separate, and of another time; we feel the ancient world to be a real thing, and one with the new: antiquity is no dream; it is rather the children playing about the old stones that are the dream. ”

“ An enthusiastic desire of visiting the Old World haunted me from early childhood. I cherished a presentiment, amounting almost to belief, that I should one day behold the scenes, among which my fancy had so long wandered. ”

“ As I now fix my gaze upon this faded and dilapidated old guide-book, bearing every token of the ravages of near half a century, and read how this piece of antiquity enlarges like a modern upon previous antiquities, I am forcibly reminded that the world is indeed growing old. ”

“ But I shall stay Here, where the ancient milestone, like a watchman, Lifts up its figure eight, its one gray knowledge, Into the twilight; as a watchman lifts A lantern, which he does not know is out." [Pg 173]
II Now by the wall of the ancient town I lean Myself, like ancient wall and dust and sky, And the purple dusk, grown old, grown old in heart. Shadows of clouds flow inward from the sea. The mottled fields grow dark. The golden wall Grows gray again, turns stone again, the tower, No longer kindled, darkens against a cloud. Old is the world, old as the world am I ”

“ The budding of new art, the survival of old religion, at isolated centres of provincial life, where varieties of human character also were keen, abundant, asserted in correspondingly effective incident— this is what irresistible fancy superinduces on historic details, themselves meagre enough. The sentiment of antiquity is indeed a characteristic of all cultivated people, even in what may seem the freshest ages, and not exclusively a humour of our later world. ”

“ Now, to examine what the Old World has to show, if anything, similar to these rudiments of civilization, we must go to the opposite gallery, where we shall find, in the collections from the river-drift of England and Southern France, implements equally rude and old-looking, but made of flint instead of the inferior argillite with which the American autochthones contented themselves. ”

“ And most terrible of all, the New World is ignorant of these potent influences upon mind and body, attributing the ancient wisdom of the Old World along these lines to the superstitious tales of ignorant peasants. ”

“ To the person who finds enjoyment, preoccupation, in studying a ruin or in contemplating glories, triumphs, dramas long dead and gone, old buildings, old cities, and old worlds sound a resistless call. The past is peopled with impressive figures, to be sure; it is a tapestry into which are woven scenes of tremendous significance and events of the greatest moment, and it is quite natural, therefore, that the majority of people should experience greater fascination in studying it than in painting new scenes upon a naked canvas with colors of their own imagining. ”

“ The place belongs so entirely to the past, and there seems such a remoteness between the hoar antiquity of a scene so thoroughly old English and the busy world from which we have just emerged, that we almost hesitate to advance. ”

“ Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was exhausted. ”

“ And yet this innate tendency to magnify and extend into the dim, illimitable regions of antiquity whatever of human effort is deemed most worthy, is a source of difficulty to the conscientious student. Amid the wild growth of myth and marvel the antiquary or archæologist warily treads his way to surer ground, and out of scattered fragments of a by-gone age constructs anew an old order of existence, or opens a vista to the mind’s eye through which glimpses may be gained of the habits and inner life of our remote ancestors. ”

“ And the gay young voice as in hours of yore.
It still seems strange to be here alone,
With the rising sob of the wind without;
The sound takes a deep, insisting tone,
Where the trees are swinging their arms about.
Its moaning reaches the sheltered room,
And thrills my heart with a sense of pain;
I walk to the window, and pierce the gloom,
With a yearning look that is all in vain.
You are out in a night of depths that hold
No promise of dawning for you and me,
And only a ghost from the life of old
Has come from the world of memory!
You are out evermore! God wills it so! ”

“ Ah, sweet Florence, let us learn from yon skies, over which, in the faith of the poets of old, brooded the wings of primaeval and serenest Love, what earthly love should be,—a thing pure as light, and peaceful as immortality, watching over the stormy world, that it shall survive, and high above the clouds and vapours that roll below. Let little minds introduce into the holiest of affections all the bitterness and tumult of common life! Let us love as beings who will one day be inhabitants of the stars! ”

“ The grand air of it all was in one's very nostrils and seemed to come from sources too numerous and too complex to name. It was antiquity in solution, with every brown, mild figure, every note of the old speech, every tilt of the great flask, every shadow cast by every classic fragment, adding its touch to the impression. What was the secret of the surprising amenity?--to the essence of which one got no nearer than simply by feeling afresh the old story of the deep interfusion of the present with the past. ”

“ I called the New World into existence, to redress the balance of the Old. ”

“ Crooked into every imaginable shape, they still hold their stems erect, memorials of past ages, revealers of what time has done;—yea, perhaps, also what the hand of man has achieved, though the old trees stand not, as many others, chroniclers connected with some of those memorable events, which give a date to history, and are waymarks, which identify the noiseless steps of time. ”

“ The relics of the past, contemplated merely because they are relics, are nothing. You tire, in this old land, of the endless array of ruined castles and of wasting graves; you sicken at the thought of the mortality of a thousand years, decaying at your feet, and you long to look again on roses and the face of childhood, the ocean and the stars. ”

“ Each man can see what glacier periods have been over the land, what thickness of ice impenetrable to pure rays from above, melted from beneath, ice which has ground down to dust the ancient heights of honor, of modest nature distrusting itself. Yes, we are the oldest people in the wide world.
Even the little village where my history directs our attention has one savor of dignified antiquity. ”

“ I have seen for some time, in the depth of my soul's innermost, a light becoming clear, and have perceived a word—I perceived them even from my earliest youth, powerful but indistinct, and although the fogs of life and the anguishes of the heart may have dimmed them, yet have I seen them again and again, like heavenly stars gleaming through earthly clouds, and now I have come to Switzerland to endeavor to attain to a clearer comprehension. ”

“ Monuments and ruins have been disinterred in the ancient seats of human power, in the oriental world, and inscriptions deciphered, which give vitality to ancient history. Ethnology has arisen to hold up the light of her resplendent lamp, amid these ruins, to guide the footsteps of letters, science and piety. ”

“ Any thing old or historic is appreciated in proportion to the scope it gives to the imagination—to point a moral or adorn a tale. We gaze on the wild hill, vale, stream or forest of a new country, with none of those feelings which fill us in beholding similar objects in an old land. ”

“ Visions you know have always been my pasture; and so far from growing old enough to quarrel with their emptiness, I almost think there is no wisdom comparable to that of exchanging what is called the realities of life for dreams. Old castles, old pictures, old histories, and the babble of old people, make one live back into centuries, that cannot disappoint one. ”

“ So rife in our own day is this manufacture of personal history, often fitted up with details of place and date into the very semblance of real chronicle, that it may be guessed how vast its working must have been in days of old. Thus the ruins of ancient buildings, of whose real history and use no trustworthy tradition survives in local memory, have been easily furnished by myth with a builder and a purpose. ”

“ It must be heartbreaking to leave an old place like this, where one’s ancestors have lived for generations, where every stone has its history, and the spirits of the departed seem still hovering in the air. ”

“ If the antiquary digs from among the ruins of Herculaneum a piece of ancient money, a vase, or a statue, we rejoice with him, in finding the mode of life, the manners and arts of an ancient people, placed before our eyes: If he finds an old record, illustrative of the history of his country, however limited in extent that country may be, we are grateful to him for the particle of knowledge he has added to our store ”

“ Facts such as these, however, bid us remember that even the relics of the past are passing away, and that cities, unlike human creatures, may grow to be so old that at last they will become new. ”

“ Because, as the vague Iliads of ancient heroes or the nebulous records of the savage gentlemen of the Middle Ages make small specific impingement on our consciousness today, so also even now begin the tales of our own old frontier to assume a haziness, an unreality, which makes them seem less history than folklore. ”

“ Wherever he went, wherever he looked, he was like an archæologist raking over an inexhaustible kitchen-midden—he was surrounded by relics of innumerable generations crowding the long centuries during which men had lived and died on this old continent. ”

“ The old trees are well qualified by age, to teach lessons of wisdom to hoary men. Had they a voice, they could discourse much concerning the mutability of things below; how nations have risen and waned, while they advanced to maturity, and of the gradual emerging of a mighty people from the darkness of past ages, to the highest pitch of intellectual culture. But this may not be, for the gifts of speech and reason, of voice and memory, are not for these ancient tenants of the soil. ”

“ Or, when that thread breaks, Archæology, which is the interpretation of the unrecorded remains of man's works, belonging to the epoch since the world has reached its present condition, may still guide him. And, when even the dim light of archæology fades, there yet remains Palæontology, which, in these latter years, has brought to daylight once more the exuvia of ancient populations, whose world was not our world, who have been buried in river beds immemorially dry, or carried by the rush of waters into caves, inaccessible to inundation since the dawn of tradition. ”

“ The bundles are undone, the sticks and stones are taken out, one by one, reverently scrutinised, and exhibited to the novice, while the old men explain to him the meaning of the patterns incised on each and reveal to him the persons, alive or dead, to whom they belong. All the time the other men keep chanting in a low voice the traditions of their remote ancestors in the far-off dream times. ”

“ Whole cities of the dead are there, and others where the new civilization rises above or by the side of the old. Temples, palaces, fortifications, ancient statues, mummies, and pottery may be cursorily admired or profoundly studied, and search may still be made for undiscovered monuments of a prehistoric past. ”

“ The most ancient city of the world has no antiquity. This flourishing abode is older than many ruins, yet it does not possess one single memorial of the past. In vain has it conquered or been conquered. ”

“ And then, taking this revealed book of the past in his hand, how a man may sit and ponder on all that is to be—dream of times when some future geological hammer will be rapping at the clay about the stone relics of his bones, and a man will gaze upon his hardened anatomy with a mild and holy joy—when all that breathes and moves to-day will be entombed in ancient strata of the earth, and busy life will be carried on a hundred feet above the ruins of the present. ”

“ It may in truth be said, that were we to pronounce what are the great and peculiar charms of this 'new world,' we should say, at once, its antiquities—the antiquities of its buried cities—its long-lost relics of a great and ingenious people—the sublimity of ages that every where surrounds us, and the strange associations which, rush upon the mind, as we [3] view ourselves in connection with an unknown and extinct species of men. Which way soever we turn our eyes, we behold the mighty remnants of their arts, and the wide waste of their mental and physical creations. ”