Publisher's Synopsis
This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1901 edition. Excerpt: ... vi The Eternal Landscape 163 will from ancient Tello to the Court of Kublai Khan, from the Athens of Pericles to the Rome of the Cesars. Everything that has been destroyed would re-exist for you. "Clear from marge to marge would bloom The Eternal Landscape of the past, A life-long stretch of time revealed." If Death were to prove such a wishing-hat we might gladly die, and so escape from the bondage of time, which, like a wave across an infinite ocean, bears all the living along together. Noble deeds that none ever recorded or even saw, we should find them there, behold and rejoice in them. Noble lives, dimly remembered, they would all be there complete, and all the noble works of men with them, in that eternal garden of the larger universe. There each bygone Ideal would still exist, with its expressions about it and the heroes that it made. Good indeed, we might then affirm, that they "had their day and ceased to be," else had there been no place for others to arise and add to the glory of the sum of things. Only those who hold such a faith can watch with equanimity the hideous energy of destruction evinced by man. Let us hope that somehow the treasures destroyed survive in what we call the past, though to the living they are henceforward lost. If they do thus survive we may demolish the noble works of our forefathers and surround ourselves with a desert to be our record in the face of Futurity. Their noble deeds we may forget. But works and deeds are beyond our power to annihilate. They have an everlasting existence in a realm whither the hand of man cannot reach to wither and destroy. Dreaming of such a timeless existence, and of such only, is it possible to say, to any man, or race, or civilization, or ideal, Esto perpetua! INDEX....