It may well be questioned whether the
human shape will ever present itself again in a race of such perfect
symmetry. But the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary,
like that of the young American. He had a string of legends, in place
of our Gospels. He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam
caravans, no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences
which have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization.
Above all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found
knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's labor
would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in private
hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for only as gold
is sought in narrow fissures and in the bed of brawling streams. Never,
since man came into this atmosphere of oxygen and azote, was there
anything like the condition of the young American of the nineteenth
century. Having in possession or in prospect the best part of half a
world, with all its climates and soils to choose from; equipped with
wings of fire and smoke that fly with him day and night, so that he
counts his journey not in miles, but in degrees, and sees the seasons
change as the wild fowl sees them in his annual flights; with huge
leviathans always ready to take him on their broad backs and push
behind them with their pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the
continent or separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations,
founder of that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart
are not lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in
space from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right
grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity
with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he
inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his
opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon acquire
the last franchise which men withhold from man,--that of stating the
laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts without
hindrance except from clearer views of truth,--he seems to want nothing
for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life.
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