The fact that Romans once inhabited her reflects no little dignity on Nature herself; that from some particular hill the Roman once looked out on the sea.  She need not be ashamed of the vestiges of her children.  How gladly the antiquary informs us that their vessels penetrated into this frith, or up that river of some remote isle!  Their military monuments still remain on the hills and under the sod of the valleys.  The oft-repeated Roman story is written in still legible characters in every quarter of the Old World, and but to-day, perchance, a new coin is dug up whose inscription repeats and confirms their fame.  Some “Judaea Capta” with a woman mourning under a palm-tree, with silent argument and demonstration confirms the pages of history.

   “Rome living was the world’s sole ornament;
    And dead is now the world’s sole monument.
       . . . . . 
    With her own weight down pressed now she lies,
    And by her heaps her hugeness testifies.”

If one doubts whether Grecian valor and patriotism are not a fiction of the poets, he may go to Athens and see still upon the walls of the temple of Minerva the circular marks made by the shields taken from the enemy in the Persian war, which were suspended there.  We have not far to seek for living and unquestionable evidence.  The very dust takes shape and confirms some story which we had read.  As Fuller said, commenting on the zeal of Camden, “A broken urn is a whole evidence; or an old gate still surviving out of which the city is run out.”  When Solon endeavored to prove that Salamis had formerly belonged to the Athenians, and not to the Megareans, he caused the tombs to be opened, and showed that the inhabitants of Salamis turned the faces of their dead to the same side with the Athenians, but the Megareans to the opposite side.  There they were to be interrogated.

Some minds are as little logical or argumentative as nature; they can offer no reason or “guess,” but they exhibit the solemn and incontrovertible fact.  If a historical question arises, they cause the tombs to be opened.  Their silent and practical logic convinces the reason and the understanding at the same time.  Of such sort is always the only pertinent question and the only satisfactory reply.

Our own country furnishes antiquities as ancient and durable, and as useful, as any; rocks at least as well covered with lichens, and a soil which, if it is virgin, is but virgin mould, the very dust of nature.  What if we cannot read Rome, or Greece, Etruria, or Carthage, or Egypt, or Babylon, on these; are our cliffs bare?  The lichen on the rocks is a rude and simple shield which beginning and imperfect Nature suspended there.  Still hangs her wrinkled trophy.  And here too the poet’s eye may still detect the brazen nails which fastened Time’s inscriptions, and if he has the gift, decipher them by this clew.  The walls that fence our fields, as well as modern Rome, and not less the Parthenon itself, are all built of ruins.  Here may be heard the din of rivers, and ancient winds which have long since lost their names sough through our woods;—­the first faint sounds of spring, older than the summer of Athenian glory, the titmouse lisping in the wood, the jay’s scream, and blue-bird’s warble, and the hum of