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

Some minds are as little logical or argumentative as nature;
they can offer no reason or “guess,” but they exhibit
the solemn and incontrovertible fact. If a historical question
arises, they cause the tombs to be opened. Their silent and
practical logic convinces the reason and the understanding
at the same time. Of such sort is always the only pertinent
question and the only satisfactory reply.
Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable,
and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with
lichens, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould,
the very dust of nature. What if we cannot read Rome, or
Greece, Etruria, or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these;
are our cliffs bare? The lichen on the rocks is a rude and
simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended
there. Still hangs her wrinkled trophy. And here too
the poet’s eye may still detect the brazen nails which fastened
Time’s inscriptions, and if he has the gift, decipher
them by this clew. The walls that fence our fields, as well as
modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built
of ruins. Here may be heard the din of rivers, and ancient
winds which have long since lost their names sough through
Henry David Thoreau
195
our woods;—the first faint sounds of spring, older than the
summer of Athenian glory, the titmouse lisping in the wood,
the jay’s scream, and blue-bird’s warble, and the hum of
“bees that fly
About the laughing blossoms of sallowy.”
Here is the gray dawn for antiquity, and our to-morrow’s
future should be at least paulo-post to theirs which we have
put behind us. There are the red-maple and birchen leaves,
old runes which are not yet deciphered; catkins, pine-cones,
vines, oak-leaves, and acorns; the very things themselves, and
not their forms in stone,—so much the more ancient and
venerable. And even to the current summer there has come
down tradition of a hoary-headed master of all art, who once
filled every field and grove with statues and god-like architecture,
of every design which Greece has lately copied; whose
ruins are now mingled with the dust, and not one block remains
upon another. The century sun and unwearied rain
have wasted them, till not one fragment from that quarry
now exists; and poets perchance will feign that gods sent