Page:The Collected Works of Theodore Parker volume 6.djvu/124

Rh bough in the woods. Nay, the population of the earth, today, is but one tree in the wide primeval forest of mankind, which covers the earth and outlasts the ages. The leaf may fall and not be missed from the bough ; the branch may be rudely broken off, and its absence not marked; the tree will die and be succeeded by other trees in the forest, green with summer beauty, or foodful and prophetic with autumnal seed. Tree by tree, the woods will pass away, and, unobserved, another forest take its place,—arising, also, tree by tree. How various the duration of States or men—dying at birth, or lasting long periods of time! For more than three thousand years, Egypt stood the queen of the world's young civilization, invincible as her own pyramids, which yet time and the nations alike respect. From Romulus, the first half-mythologic king of the seven-hilled city, to Augustulus, her last historic emperor, it is more than twelve centuries. At this day the Austrian, the Spanish, the French and German sovereigns sit each on a long-descended throne. Victoria is "daughter of a hundred kings." Pope Pius the Ninth claims two hundred and fifty-six predecessors, canonical and "infallible." His chair is reckoned more than eighteen hundred years old; and it rests on an Etrurian platform yet ten centuries more ancient. The Turkish throne has been firmly fixed at Constantinople for four hundred years. Individual tyrants, like summer flies, are short-lived; but tyranny is old and lasting. The family of ephemera, permanent amid the fleeting, is yet as old as that of elephants, and will last as long. But free governments have commonly been brief. If the Hebrew people had well-nigh a thousand years of independent national life, their Commonwealth lasted but about three centuries; the flower of their literature and religion was but little longer. The historic period of Greece begins 776 ; her independence was all over in six hundred and thirty years. The Roman deluge had swallowed it up. No Deucahon and Pyrrha could re-people the land with men. Her little States—how brief was their hour of freedom for the people 1 From the first annual archon of Athens to her conquest by Philip, and the death of her liberty, it was only two hundred and forty-five years!