"You are not to suppose that Harry and I were always at variance. Our skirmishing was our amusement. He was teachable, very teachable,—and more and more as he grew older. Some of the happiest hours I have to look back upon were passed with him by my side, his reverent and earnest look showing how devoutly, with what serious joy, his young soul welcomed its first conscious perceptions of the laws of Nature, the sacred truths of Science."
By the Riverside.
The morning called me out imperatively. It is almost like that Sunday morning on which I took my first early walk with Harry. I fell into the same path we followed then. This path led us to the Dohuta. We walked slowly along its fringed bank, as I have been walking along it now, and stopped here where the river makes a little bend round a just perceptible rising graced by three ilex-trees. We found ourselves here more than once afterwards. We never thought beforehand what way we should take; we could not go amiss, where we went together.
The river holds its calm flow as when Harry was beside it with me. Here are the trees whose vigorous growth he praised, their thorny foliage glittering in the new sunlight as it glittered then. These associates of that pleasant time, renewing their impressions, awaken more and more vividly those of the dearer companionship.
It is strange the faithfulness with which the seemingly indifferent objects about us keep for us the record of hours that they have witnessed, rendering up our own past to us in a completeness in which our memory would not have reproduced it but for the suggestions of these unchosen confidants. Without displacing the familiar scene, distant and far other landscapes rise before me, visions that Harry Dudley called up for me here; to all the clear, fresh sounds of the early morning join themselves again our asking and replying voices.
I knew at once when a place had a particular interest for Harry, by the tone in which he pronounced the name. Fiesole was always a beautiful word for me, but how beautiful now that I must hear in it his affectionate accent! Volterra has a charm which it does not owe to its dim antiquity, or owes to it as revivified by him. His strong sympathy, embracing the remoter and the near, makes the past as actual to him as the present, and both alike poetic.
Harry's researches have not been carried on as a pastime, or even as a pursuit, but as a true study, a part of his preparation for a serviceable life. It is the history of humanity that he explores, and he reads it more willingly in its achievements than in its failures. The remains of the early art of Etruria, its grand works of utility, give evidence of the immemorial existence of a true civilization upon that favored soil, the Italy of Italy.
Among the retributions of time—as just in its compensations as in its revenges—there is hardly one more remarkable than this which is rendering justice to the old Etruscans, awakening the world to a long unacknowledged debt. Their annals have been destroyed, their literature has perished, their very language has passed away; but their life wrote itself on the country for whose health, fertility, and beauty they invented and labored,—wrote itself in characters so strong that the wear of the long ages has not effaced them. This original civilization has never been expelled from the scene of its ancient reign. Through all changes, under all oppressions, amid all violences, it has held itself in life,—has found means to assert and reassert its beneficent rights. Its very enemies have owed to it that they have been able to blend with their false glory some share of a more honorable fame. In its early seats it has never left itself long without a witness; but still some new gift to the world, in letters, in art, or in science, has given proof of its yet unexhausted resources.
As freedom is older than despotism, so civilization is older than barbarism. Man, made in the image of God, was made loving, loyal, beneficently creative.