120 Overdoing the Past 



amuse ourselves with peering into the future, 

 as the belated traveller peers into the darkness 

 before him, but we cannot speak with accu- 

 racy as to what we see. 



To return to current literature. Should 

 we not concern ourselves more with what is 

 daily transpiring, and less with what has been 

 or might have been ? 



Is not the importance of history overdrawn 

 when it is held up so closely to our faces that 

 we cannot see what a bright world there is 

 behind it ? Does it not begoggle our eyes so 

 that the Present is robbed of its beauty ? 

 The value of history is unquestionable, but 

 its overvaluation is a greater misfortune than 

 that our yesterdays should forever be utter 

 blanks in our lives. Then, too, the manner 

 of these historical presentments is open to 

 criticism. Their authors are too given to 

 distort a fat for the sake of rhetorical flourish, 

 and every pifture of their favorites with- 

 out one single exception is painted in the 

 most glowing colors. Their heroes verge 

 on the angelic, and yet not one of them but 

 was somewhere, somehow, at some time, 

 miserably weak. The human frame is no fit 

 cage for an angelic spirit, and the historical 



