In like manner, the
beauties and fine thoughts of ancient and obsolete authors are
caught up by these flights of predatory writers, and cast forth,
again to flourish and bear fruit in a remote and distant tract of
time. Many of their works, also, undergo a kind of
metempsychosis, and spring up under new forms. What was formerly
a ponderous history, revives in the shape of a romance--an old
legend changes into a modern play--and a sober philosophical
treatise furnishes the body for a whole series of bouncing and
sparkling essays. Thus it is in the clearing of our American
woodlands; where we burn down a forest of stately pines, a
progeny of dwarf oaks start up in their place; and we never see
the prostrate trunk of a tree mouldering into soil, but it gives
birth to a whole tribe of fungi.
Let us not then, lament over the decay and oblivion into which
ancient writers descend; they do but submit to the great law of
Nature, which declares that all sublunary shapes of matter shall
be limited in their duration, but which decrees, also, that their
element shall never perish. Generation after generation, both in
animal and vegetable life, passes away, but the vital principle
is transmitted to posterity, and the species continue to
flourish.
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