84 A GREAT PUBLIC CHARACTER. 



Mexico or Peru. The lives of our worthies, like that of 

 our nation, are bare of those foregone and far-reaching 

 associations with names, the divining-rods of fancy, which 

 the soldiers and civilians of the Old World get for 

 nothing by the mere accident of birth. Their historians 

 and biographers have succeeded to the good-will, as 

 well as to the long-established stand, of the shop of 

 glory. Time is, after all, the greatest of poets, and the 

 sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs 

 of Fame. The philosophic poet may find a proud solace 

 in saying, 



" Avia Pieridum peragro loca nullius ante 

 Tritasolo"; 



but all the while he has the splendid centuries of Greece 

 and Rome behind him, and can begin his poem with in- 

 voking a goddess from whom legend derived the planter 

 of his race. His eyes looked out on a landscape satu- 

 rated with glorious recollections ; he had seen Csesar, 

 and heard Cicero. But who shall conjure with Saugus 

 or Cato Four Corners, with Israel Putnam or Return 

 Jonathan Meigs ] We have been transplanted, and for 

 us the long hierarchical succession of history is broken. 

 The Past has not laid its venerable hands upon us in 

 consecration, conveying to us that mysterious influence 

 whose force is in its continuity. We are to Europe as 

 the Church of England to her of Rome. The latter old 

 lady may be the Scarlet Woman, or the Beast with ten 

 horns, if you will, but hers are all the heirlooms, hers 

 that vast spiritual estate of tradition, nowhere yet every- 

 where, whose revenues are none the less fruitful for 

 being levied on the imagination. We may claim that 

 England's history is also ours, but it is a dejure, and not 

 a de facto property that we have in it, something that 

 may be proved indeed, yet is a merely intellectual satis- 

 faction, and does not savor of the realty. Have we not 



