Digital heart book

The place
where we sit is called Hudson,--once it was Nottingham,--once --

We should read history as little critically as we consider the
landscape, and be more interested by the atmospheric tints and
various lights and shades which the intervening spaces create,
than by its groundwork and composition. It is the morning now
turned evening and seen in the west,--the same sun, but a new
light and atmosphere. Its beauty is like the sunset; not a
fresco painting on a wall, flat and bounded, but atmospheric and
roving or free. In reality, history fluctuates as the face of
the landscape from morning to evening. What is of moment is its
hue and color. Time hides no treasures; we want not its _then_,
but its _now_. We do not complain that the mountains in the
horizon are blue and indistinct; they are the more like the
heavens.
Of what moment are facts that can be lost,--which need to be
commemorated? The monument of death will outlast the memory of
the dead. The pyramids do not tell the tale which was confided
to them; the living fact commemorates itself.


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