ature. History no longer
shall be a dull book. It shall walk incarnate in every just and wise
man. You shall not tell me by languages and titles a catalogue of the
volumes you have read. You shall make me feel what periods you have
lived. A man shall be the Temple of Fame. He shall walk, as the poets
have described that goddess, in a robe painted all over with wonderful
events and experiences;--his own form and features by their exalted
intelligence shall be that variegated vest. I shall find in him the
Foreworld; in his childhood the Age of Gold, the Apples of Knowledge,
the Argonautic Expedition, the calling of Abraham, the building of the
Temple, the Advent of Christ, Dark Ages, the Revival of Letters, the
Reformation, the discovery of new lands, the opening of new sciences and
new regions in man. He shall be the priest of Pan, and bring with him
into humble cottages the blessing of the morning stars, and all the
recorded benefits of heaven and earth.

Is there somewhat overweening in this claim? Then I reject all I have
written, for what is the use of pretending to know what we know not? But
it is the fault of our rhetoric that we cannot strongly state one fact
without seeming to belie some other. I hold our actual knowledge very
cheap. Hear the rats in the wall, see the lizard on the fence,
the fungus under foot, the lichen on the log. What do I know
sympathetically, morally, of either of these worlds of life? As old
as the Caucasian man,--perhaps older,--these creatures have kept their
counsel beside him, and there is no record of any word or sign that has
passed from one to the other. What connection do the books show between
the fifty or sixty chemical elements and the historical eras? Nay, what
does history yet record of the metaphysical annals of man? What light
does it shed on those mysteries which we hide under the names Death
and Immortality? Yet every history should be written in a wisdom which
divined the range of our affinities and looked at facts as symbols. I am
ashamed to see what a shallow village tale our so-called History is. How
many times we must say Rome, and Paris, and Constantinople! What does
Rome know of rat and lizard? What are Olympiads and Consulates to these
neighboring systems of being? Nay, what food or experience or succor
have they for the Esquimaux seal-hunter, for the Kanaka in his canoe,
for the fisherman, the stevedore, the porter?

Broader and deeper we must write our annals,--