Page:The Rise of American Civilization (Volume 1).djvu/135

 of the dead past into the living present in a thousand shapes and forms. In haunting shadows the domestic life hovers around old houses, gray and gabled, crowned by cowls of arching elms and spreading oaks. Counterpanes and rugs seem even now to be taking form under nimble fingers that were moldering in village churchyards when Thomas Jefferson's pen was tracing the Declaration of Independence. Paintings that hang on walls, as they did in the days of Franklin and Washington, call back to power masters and mistresses from classes that ruled and preached and traded and planted in those far-off times. Diaries and letters lift the curtain on gay hours of weddings, fox hunts, and balls and on solemn scenes of worship, tragedy, and death. Quaint towns planned with strong communal purpose, state houses, churches, and college halls, still solid under the weight of years, survive as the visible and outward symbols of vigorous public life. Stagecoaches and models of sailing vessels reveal colonial merchants and wayfarers traveling on land and sea. Narratives and journals throw the light of contemporary opinion on the passing panorama. Books, pamphlets, almanacs, newspapers, and magazines produced on the soil of the New World reflect the depths and shallows of the American intellect; libraries, public and private, collected from the corners of Europe, mark the wide range of colonial research and understanding.

In this treasury of riches diverse minds have been at work; fragments have been selected from it to fit the patterns of many special interests. Enthusiastic makers of family traditions, moved by sentiments as deep as ancestor worship, have disclosed under the radiance of their warm desires progenitors as proud and gracious as the Burleighs and Percys of old England. Simple collectors of curios have gathered up pewter plate, glass, and Windsor chairs. Novelists have discovered plots and preachers have unearthed themes. Hurried critics, feeding the maw of the modern press, have found illustrations to bolster curious creeds and justify varied moods: a Baltimore journalist of