Any thing old or historic is appreciated in proportion to the scope it gives to the imagination—to point a moral or adorn a tale. We gaze on the wild hill, vale, stream or forest of a new country, with none of those feelings which fill us in beholding similar objects in an old land. The former may be as fair or fairer to see; but, as
“A primrose by the river’s brim,
A yellow primrose was to him.”
of whom Wordsworth speaks, so the latter is a stream, a forest, a hill—nothing more. The nameless savages had the place from the beginning, and the solitude. The other is a tradition, a romance, a memory. In the valley is the legendary well, and the fairy ring; by the stream is the fortalice of the feudal period, or the abbey dwindled to a few ivied walls and the oriel, on the site of a bloody battle where a king fell fighting, a thousand years ago; and, on the slope of the hill stand the Druid stones, in a circle, set there, certainly, in the ancient time of the giants, who descended from Thor and
Lived in the oldé days of King Artour.
As Webster, the old English dramatist, says:
We love these ancient ruins;
We never tread upon them, but we set
Our foot upon some reverend history.
They receive all their witchery from the imagination of him who surveys them. This faculty is potentially mingled with all that is most real in nature; nay, it would seem to be as much a reality as any thing else we call such. The preacher calls the world a vain shadow, and the Berkleyan philosopher calls it a huge accident of the five senses; and Shakspeare is inclined to think there is nothing that is but thinking makes it so. The practical men, therefore,—the directors of railways, the managers of stock, and the owners of electric telegraphs cannot be considered to have matters all to themselves. The poet and the romancist control as much of the “thick rotundity of the world” as they; and certainly the most enchanting portion. Schiller gives us in an admired lyric, the idea that the imaginative being was forgotten by Jove in the distribution of the earth; but received a general invitation to the Court of Olympus. Our nether “maker,” or “finder,” does still, of course, avail himself of this privilege; but not as one without alternative. He has a great share and dominion in all sublinary things; and his castles in the air may be found as firmly fixed, after all, and as well tenanted, as any existing on any other element.