Page:Female Prose Writers of America.djvu/214

 of man, at least his great, lasting, and boundless improvement. Thought is roused, mind is awakened, which never again can sleep. Vainly are we told that preceding ages have shown equal civilization and similar improvement. Vainly is our attention directed to the great Nineveh, to Egypt, to Greece, and to Rome. These certainly do show—these have shown—progression and retrogression, rise and fall, as the great pulse of humanity has throbbed in its breathing of ages; but never has the world-soul been roused, as now, by the expansion of thought, circulating to distant points of our globe, whose very existence was not dreamed of by the wise of ancient days. Never has the great heart of civilization cast, as now, by its every pulsation, its life-blood to the farthest extremes of a universe, rousing itself from unconscious infancy to the full action of a reasoning being. Great as were the efforts of the ancients—great as were the results of those efforts—they were confined to little corners of a world, which now basks under the full radiance of extended and extending light. And yet, even of these efforts, nothing has been lost. The soul of their civilization, as each sank in its ruins, was breathed into the survivor, until at last, in the great crash of Roman power, the shattered remnants of its pride and its knowledge, scattering through Europe, laid the basis of modern civilization. This can never die—this can never be crushed. If driven from the East it would seek the West; crushed in the West still could it breathe in the East. A civilized state may fall back into barbarism; a civilized world—never! The diffusive spirit of Christianity, the wonderful invention of letters, the discovery of our Western world, the wide-spread power of steam, and now Heaven’s lightning, by science tamed to be man’s messenger—these put us on a pinnacle which Greece and Rome could never dream of. And yet the world is young! We look not into its future; veiled to us are its glories. But through the mist and mystery of forthcoming ages, interpreted by the awakening beam of the past, may we not read the one great hope,—the one bright truth,—man is improving, improvable, ceaselessly and boundlessly!

Yet not for this, alas! are we now exempt from the wildest