Page:The first and last journeys of Thoreau - lately discovered among his unpublished journals and manuscripts.djvu/144

 I must confess I fear that the Muse has stooped in her flight when I come to the literature of civilized nations and eras. We then first hear of different ages of poetry; of Augustan and Elizabethan ages; but the poetry of runic monuments is for every age. The whole difference seems to be that the poet has come within doors. The old bard stood without. How different are Homer and Ossian from Dryden and Pope and Gray, and even Milton and Shakespeare! Hosts of warriors earnest for battle could not mistake nor dispense with the ancient bards. There was no danger of their being overlooked by their generations. They spoke but as they acted. Take one of our modern, well arranged poems, and expose it to the elements, as Stonehenge has been exposed. Let the rains beat on it and the winds shake it, and how will its timbers look at the end of a few centuries? I like to hear, when they dig beneath some mysterious flat stone far under the mould, of the few huge bones they find and the sword which modern men cannot wield.

When the stern old bard makes his heroes [96]