history of roads is, in great
measure indeed, a history of civilization itself. For highways and great
cities not merely presuppose the existence of each other, but are also
the issues and exponents of two leading impulses in the nature of man.
Actuated by the one--the centripetal instinct--the shepherd races of Asia
founded their great capitals on the banks of the Euphrates and the
Ganges: impelled by the other--the centrifugal instinct--they passed
forth from their cradle in the Armenian Highlands, westward as far as the
Atlantic, and eastward as far as the Pacific. We have indeed indications
of roads earlier than we have accounts of cities. For ages before
Arcadian Evander came as a "squatter" to Mount Palatine, was there not
the great road of the Hyperboreans from Ausonia to Delphi, by which, with
each revolving year, the most blameless of mankind conveyed to the Dorian
Sun-god their offerings? And as soon as Theseus--the organizer of men,
as his name imports--had slain the wolves and bears and the biped
ruffians of the Corinthian Isthmus, did he not set up a direction-post,
informing the wayfarer that "this side was Peleponnesus, and that side
was Ionia"? Centuries of thought and toil indeed intervened between the
path across the plain or down the mountain-gorge and the Regina Viarum,
the Appian Road; and centuries between the rude stone-heap which marked
out to the thirsting wayfarer the well in the desert, and the stately
column which told the traveller, "This is the road to Byzantium."

In the land of "Geryon's sons," the paths which scaled the sierras were
attributed to the toils of Hercules. In Boeotia, at a most remote era,
there was a broad carriage-road from Thebes to Phocis, and at one of its
intersections by a second highway the homicide of Laius opened the "long
process" of woes, which for three generations enshrouded, as with "the
gloom of earthquake and eclipse," the royal house of Labdacus. We have
some doubts about the nature, or indeed the existence, of the road along
which the ass Borak conveyed Mahommed to the seventh heaven: but we have
no grounds for questioning the fact of the great causeway, which Milton
saw in his vision, leading from Pandemonium to this earth, for have not
Sin and Death been travelling upon it unceasingly for now six thousand
years?

From that region beyond the moon, where, according to Ariosto--and Milton
also vouches for the fact,--all things lost on earth are to b