The ages have not
added a new ray to the one, nor altered a fibre of the other.
If we will admit time into our thoughts at all, the mythologies,
those vestiges of ancient poems, wrecks of poems, so to speak,
the world's inheritance, still reflecting some of their original
splendor, like the fragments of clouds tinted by the rays of the
departed sun; reaching into the latest summer day, and allying
this hour to the morning of creation; as the poet sings: -
"Fragments of the lofty strain
Float down the tide of years,
As buoyant on the stormy main
A parted wreck appears."
These are the materials and hints for a history of the rise and
progress of the race; how, from the condition of ants, it arrived
at the condition of men, and arts were gradually invented. Let a
thousand surmises shed some light on this story. We will not be
confined by historical, even geological periods which would allow
us to doubt of a progress in human affairs. If we rise above
this wisdom for the day, we shall expect that this morning of the
race, in which it has been supplied with the simplest necessaries,
with corn, and wine, and honey, and oil, and fire, and articulate
speech, and agricultural and other arts, reared up by degrees
from the condition of ants to men, will be succeeded by a day of
equally progressive splendor; that, in the lapse of the divine
periods, other divine agents and godlike men will assist to
elevate the race as much above its present condition.
But we do not know much about it.
Thus did one voyageur waking dream, while his companion slumbered
on the bank. Suddenly a boatman's horn was heard echoing from
shore to shore, to give notice of his approach to the farmer's
wife with whom he was to take his dinner, though in that place
only muskrats and kingfishers seemed to hear. The current of our
reflections and our slumbers being thus disturbed, we weighed
anchor once more.
As we proceeded on our way in the afternoon, the western bank
became lower, or receded farther from the channel in some places,
leaving a few trees only to fringe the water's edge; while the
eastern rose abruptly here and there into wooded hills fifty or
sixty feet high. The bass, _Tilia Americana_, also called the
lime or linden, which was a new tree to us, overhung the water
with its broad and rounded leaf, interspersed with clusters of
small hard berries now nearly ripe, and made an agreeable shade
for us sailors. The inner bark of this genus is the bast, the
material of the fisherman's matting, and the ropes and peasant's
shoes of which the Russians make so much use, and also of nets
and a coarse cloth in some places.
