This, I take it, is a satisfaction, a sweetness and peace to
the soul in nature, because it carries with it a sense of the
continuity of the human race, its undying vigour, its
everlastingness. After all the tempests that have overcome
it, through all mutations in such immense stretches of time,
how stable it is!
I recall the time when I lived on a vast vacant level green
plain, an earth which to the eye, and to the mind which sees
with the eye, appeared illimitable, like the ocean; where the
house I was born in was the oldest in the district--a century
old, it was said; where the people were the children's
children of emigrants from Europe who had conquered and
colonized the country, and had enjoyed but half a century of
national life. But the people who had possessed the land
before these emigrants--what of them? They, were but a
memory, a tradition, a story told in books and hardly more
to us than a fable; perhaps they had dwelt there for long
centuries, or for thousands of years; perhaps they had come,
a wandering horde, to pass quickly away like a flight of
migrating locusts; for no memorial existed, no work of their
hands, not the faintest trace of their occupancy.
Walking one day at the side of a ditch, which had been newly
cut through a meadow at the end of our plantation, I caught
sight of a small black object protruding from the side of the
cutting, which turned out to be a fragment of Indian pottery
made of coarse clay, very black, and rudely ornamented on one
side.
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