A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers - Pennsylvania State ...

These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack
of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples
of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this
river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil.
The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along
these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on
the trail of the Indian.
The fact that Romans once inhabited her reflects no little
dignity on Nature herself; that from some particular hill the
Roman once looked out on the sea. She need not be ashamed
of the vestiges of her children. How gladly the antiquary
informs us that their vessels penetrated into this frith, or up
that river of some remote isle! Their military monuments
still remain on the hills and under the sod of the valleys. The
oft-repeated Roman story is written in still legible characters
in every quarter of the Old World, and but to-day, perchance,
a new coin is dug up whose inscription repeats and confirms
their fame. Some “Judaea Capta” with a woman mourning
under a palm-tree, with silent argument and demonstration
confirms the pages of history.
A <strong>Week</strong> on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers
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“Rome living was the world’s sole ornament;
And dead is now the world’s sole monument.
. . . . .
With her own weight down pressed now she lies,
And by her heaps her hugeness testifies.”
If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not
a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon
the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by
the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which
were suspended there. We have not far to seek for living and
unquestionable evidence. The very dust takes shape and confirms
some story which we had read. As Fuller said, commenting
on the zeal of Camden, “A broken urn is a whole evidence;
or an old gate still surviving out of which the city is run out.”
When Solon endeavored to prove that Salamis had formerly
belonged to the Athenians, and not to the Megareans, he caused
the tombs to be opened, and showed that the inhabitants of
Salamis turned the faces of their dead to the same side with
the Athenians, but the Megareans to the opposite side. There
they were to be interrogated.