sical studies. Thus, it is urged, that, in
every department of human knowledge, we transcend the most splendid
acquirements of the ancients, and therefore that it is so much time
wasted which we devote towards keeping up an acquaintance with
antiquity. But how is it that we so far overtop the ancients? Simply by
preserving our conscious connection with them, just as manhood towers
above childhood through the remembered experiences of childhood. As an
evidence of this, we need only note the sudden impulse which modern
civilization received through the revival of ancient literature. As it
is by resolving into constellations the _nebulae_, disconnected from the
earth by vast intervals of space, that we conjecture the awful magnitude
of the universe, so do we conjecture the magnitude of human life by
resolving into distinct shapes the nebulous mist of antiquity separated
from us by vast intervals in time. The profoundest lessons, such as are
heeded by the race, such as are universally intelligible, have this
obliquity of origin. Thus, in the distractions of the present, no relief
is found through compensatory consolations from the present; but we turn
to the figures of the past,--figures caught in the mind, and held fixed,
as in bas-relief,--figures in the attitude of antagonistic strife or of
sublime rest,--figures that master our intellects as can none from the
tumultuous present, (excepting the present of dreams,) and that out of
their eternal repose anticipate for us contingencies that do not yet
exist, but are representatively typified through such as have existed
and passed away.

It is a fact well ascertained in physical geography, that the New World
and the Old stand over against each other, not merely as antipodal
opposites, but so corresponding in outline that a promontory in one is
met by a gulf in the other, and sinuous seas by outstanding continents,
(so that over against the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, is opposed the
projection of Western Africa,) as if the gods had, in the registry of
some important covenant, rent the earth in twain for indentures. In this
way, also, do the two great hemispheres of Time stand opposed; so that,
from the shaping of the ancient, we may anticipate even the undeveloped
conformation of the modern: in place of the direct reality, which is of
necessity wanting, we have the next best thing to guide us even in our
most perilous coastings, namely, its well-defined _analogue_ in the
re