for the very scanty traces to be found in America of
the secondary deposits; for the Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic beds,
instead of being raised to form successive shores, along which their
deposits could be accumulated in regular sequence, as had been the case
with the Azoic, Silurian, and Devonian deposits in the northern part of
the United States, were constantly sinking, so that the Triassic settled
above the Permian, the Jurassic above the Triassic, and so on, each set
of strata thus covering over and concealing the preceding one. Though we
find the stratified rocks of these periods cropping out here and there,
where some violent disturbance or the abrading action of water has
torn asunder or worn away the overlying strata, yet we never find
them consecutively over any extensive region; and it is not till the
Cretaceous and earlier Tertiary periods that we find again a regular
succession of deposits around the shores of the continent, marking its
present outlines. It is, then, in Europe, where the sequence of their
beds is most complete, that we must seek to decipher the history of the
middle geological ages; and therefore, when I meet my readers again,
it will be in the Old World of civilization, though more recent in its
physical features than the one we leave.

* * * * *

TO E.W.

I know not, Time and Space so intervene,
Whether, still waiting with a trust serene,
Thou bearest up thy fourscore years and ten,
Or, called at last, art now Heaven's citizen;
But, here or there, a pleasant thought of thee,
Like an old friend, all day has been with me.
The shy, still boy, for whom thy kindly hand
Smoothed his hard pathway to the wonder-land
Of thought and fancy, in gray manhood yet
Keeps green the memory of his early debt.
To-day, when truth and falsehood speak their words
Through hot-lipped cannon and the teeth of swords,
Listening with quickened heart and ear intent
To each sharp clause of that stern argument,
I still can hear at times a softer note
Of the old pastoral music round me float,
While through the hot gleam of our civil strife
Looms the green mirage of a simpler life.
As, at his alien post, the sentinel
Drops the old bucket in the homestead well,
And hears old voices in the winds that toss
Above his head the live-oak's beard of moss,
So, in our trial-time, and under skies
Shadowed by swords like Islam's paradise