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 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.
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