from which my whole golden chain of
historical dependencies is to swing. And even that will suffice. Careful
navigators, indeed, like to ride by three anchors; but I am content with
what I have achieved, even if my next attempt should be less
satisfactory.

It is certainly a very striking fact to the imagination that great
revolutions seldom come as solitary cases. It never rains but it pours.
At times there _is_ some dark sympathy, which runs underground,
connecting remote events like a ground-swell in the ocean, or like the
long careering[35] of an earthquake before it makes its explosion.
_Abyssus abyssum invocat_--'One deep calleth to another.' And in some
incomprehensible way, powers not having the slightest _apparent_
interconnexion, no links through which any _casual_ influence could
rationally be transmitted, do, nevertheless, in fact, betray either a
blind nexus--an undiscoverable web of dependency upon each other, or
else a dependency upon some common cause equally undiscoverable. What
possible, what remote connexion could the dissolution of the Assyrian
empire have with the Olympiads or with the building of Rome? Certainly
none at all that we can see; and yet these great events so nearly
synchronize that even the latest of them seems but a more distant
undulation of the same vast swell in the ocean, running along from west
to east, from the Tiber to the Tigris. Some great ferment of revolution
was then abroad. The overthrew of Nineveh as the capital of the Assyrian
empire, the ruin of the dynasty ending in Sardanapalus, and the
subsequent dismemberment of the Assyrian empire, took place, according
to most chronologers, 747 years B.C., just 30 years, therefore, after
the two great events which I have assigned to 777. These two events are
in the strictest and most capital sense the inaugural events of history,
the very pillars of Hercules which indicate a _ne plus ultra_ in that
direction; namely, that all beyond is no longer history but romance. I
am exceedingly anxious to bring this Assyrian revolution also to the
same great frontier line of columns. In a gross general way it might
certainly be argued that in such a great period, thirty years, or one
generation, can be viewed as nothing more than a trifling quantity. But
it must also be considered that the exact time, and even the exact
personality,[36] of Sardanapalus in all his relations are not known. All
are vast phantoms in the Assyrian empire; I do not