ghost to a living man.
There is no reason why it should not have been an age of high
civilization and cultural activities; but all is too shadowy to
say what they were. To its first centuries are accredited works
of engineering that would make our greatest modern achievements
look small: common sense would say, probably the reminiscence of
something actual. Certainly the Chinese emerged from it, and into
daylight history, not primitive but effete: senile, not
childlike. That may be only a racial peculiarity, a national
prejudice, of course.

And where should you look, back of 850 B. C., to find actual
history--human motives, speech and passions--or what to our eyes
should appear such? As things near the time-horizon, they lose
their keen outlines and grow blurred and dim. The Setis and
Thothmeses are names to us, with no personality attaching;
though we have discovered their mummies, and know the semblance
of their features, our imagination cannot clothe them with life.
We can hear a near Napoleon joking, but not a far-off Rameses. We
can call Justinian from his grave, and traverse the desert with
Mohammed; but can bold no converse with Manu or Hammurabi;--
because these two dwell well this side of the time-horizon, but
the epochs of those are far beyond it. The stars set: the summer
evenings forget Orion, and the nights of winter the beauty of
Fomalhaut: though there is a long slope between the zenith _Now_
and the sea-rim, what has once gone down beyond the west of time
we cannot recall or refashion. So that old Chinese manvantara is
gone after the Dragon Fo-hi and the Yellow Emperor, after the
Man-Kings and the Earth-Kings and the Heaven-Kings; and Yao,
Shun, and Yu the Great, and the kings of Hia, and Shang, and even
Chow, are but names and shadows,

_Quo pater, Aeneas, quo dires Tullus et Ancus,_

--we cannot make them interestingly alive. But it does not follow
that they did not live when they are supposed to have lived, or
do the things attributed to them. Their architecture was
ephemeral, and bears no witness to them; they built no pyramids
to flout time; they raised no monument but a people, a culture,
an idea, that still endures.

Then, too, we shall see that at the beginning of the last Chinese
manvantara a conscious attempt was made to break wholly with the
past,--to wipe it from human memory, and begin all anew. Such a
thing happened in Babylon once; there had been a Sargon in
remote antiqu