Page:A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.djvu/77

Rh than cursing and swearing. There is sin and death in such words. Let not the children hear them.—My neighbor says that his hill farm is "poor stuff," "only fit to hold the world together,"—and much more to that effect. He deserves that God should give him a better for so free a treating of his gifts, more than if he patiently put up therewith. But perhaps my farmer forgets that his lean soil has sharpened his wits. This is a crop it was good for.

One memorable addition to the old mythology is due to this era,—the Christian fable. With what pains, and tears, and blood, these centuries have woven this and added it to the mythology of mankind. The new Prometheus. With what miraculous consent, and patience, and persistency, has this mythus been stamped upon the memory of the race? It would seem as if it were in the progress of our mythology to dethrone Jehovah, and crown Christ in his stead.

If it is not a tragical life we live, then I know not what to call it. Such a story as that of Jesus Christ,—the history of Jerusalem, say, being a part of the Universal History. The naked, the embalmed, unburied death of Jerusalem amid its desolate hills,—think of it. In Tasso's poem I trust some things are sweetly buried. Consider the snappish tenacity with which they preach Christianity still. What are time and space to Christianity, eighteen hundred years, and a new world?—that the humble life of a Jewish peasant should have force to make a New York bishop so bigoted. Forty-four lamps, the gift of kings, now burning in a place called the Holy Sepulchre;—a church bell ringing;—some unaffected tears shed by a pilgrim on Mount Calvary within the week.—

"Jerusalem, Jerusalem, when I forget thee, may my right hand forget her cunning."