Digital heart book

But one veil hangs
over past, present, and future, and it is the province of the
historian to find out, not what was, but what is. Where a battle
has been fought, you will find nothing but the bones of men and
beasts; where a battle is being fought, there are hearts beating.
We will sit on a mound and muse, and not try to make these
skeletons stand on their legs again. Does Nature remember, think
you, that they _were_ men, or not rather that they _are_ bones?
Ancient history has an air of antiquity. It should be more
modern. It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of
the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author
expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail
to them their own experience. Men seem anxious to accomplish an
orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the
works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of
time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a
prey to the arch enemy. History has neither the venerableness of
antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern.


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