“bees that fly
     About the laughing blossoms of sallowy.”

Here is the gray dawn for antiquity, and our to-morrow’s future should be at least paulo-post to theirs which we have put behind us.  There are the red-maple and birchen leaves, old runes which are not yet deciphered; catkins, pine-cones, vines, oak-leaves, and acorns; the very things themselves, and not their forms in stone,—­so much the more ancient and venerable.  And even to the current summer there has come down tradition of a hoary-headed master of all art, who once filled every field and grove with statues and god-like architecture, of every design which Greece has lately copied; whose ruins are now mingled with the dust, and not one block remains upon another.  The century sun and unwearied rain have wasted them, till not one fragment from that quarry now exists; and poets perchance will feign that gods sent down the material from heaven.

What though the traveller tell us of the ruins of Egypt, are we so sick or idle, that we must sacrifice our America and to-day to some man’s ill-remembered and indolent story?  Carnac and Luxor are but names, or if their skeletons remain, still more desert sand, and at length a wave of the Mediterranean Sea are needed to wash away the filth that attaches to their grandeur.  Carnac!  Carnac! here is Carnac for me.  I behold the columns of a larger and purer temple.

     This is my Carnac, whose unmeasured dome
     Shelters the measuring art and measurer’s home. 
     Behold these flowers, let us be up with time,
     Not dreaming of three thousand years ago,
     Erect ourselves and let those columns lie,
     Not stoop to raise a foil against the sky. 
     Where is the spirit of that time but in
     This present day, perchance the present line? 
     Three thousand years ago are not agone,
     They are still lingering in this summer morn,
     And Memnon’s Mother sprightly greets us now,
     Wearing her youthful radiance on her brow. 
     If Carnac’s columns still stand on the plain,
     To enjoy our opportunities they remain.

In these parts dwelt the famous Sachem Pasaconaway, who was seen by Gookin “at Pawtucket, when he was about one hundred and twenty years old.”  He was reputed a wise man and a powwow, and restrained his people from going to war with the English.  They believed “that he could make water burn, rocks move, and trees dance, and metamorphose himself into a flaming man; that in winter he could raise a green leaf out of the ashes of a dry one, and produce a living snake from the skin of a dead one, and many similar miracles.”  In 1660, according to Gookin, at a great feast and dance, he made his farewell speech to his people, in which he said, that as he was not likely to see them met together again, he would leave them this word of advice, to take heed how they quarrelled with their English neighbors, for though they might do them much mischief at first,