Ancient history has an air of antiquity.  It should be more modern.  It is written as if the spectator should be thinking of the backside of the picture on the wall, or as if the author expected that the dead would be his readers, and wished to detail to them their own experience.  Men seem anxious to accomplish an orderly retreat through the centuries, earnestly rebuilding the works behind, as they are battered down by the encroachments of time; but while they loiter, they and their works both fall a prey to the arch enemy.  History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern.  It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—­when did burdock and plantain sprout first?  It has been so written for the most part, that the times it describes are with remarkable propriety called dark ages.  They are dark, as one has observed, because we are so in the dark about them.  The sun rarely shines in history, what with the dust and confusion; and when we meet with any cheering fact which implies the presence of this luminary, we excerpt and modernize it.  As when we read in the history of the Saxons that Edwin of Northumbria “caused stakes to be fixed in the highways where he had seen a clear spring,” and “brazen dishes were chained to them to refresh the weary sojourner, whose fatigues Edwin had himself experienced.”  This is worth all Arthur’s twelve battles.

   “Through the shadow of the world we sweep into the younger day: 
    Better fifty years of Europe than a cycle of Cathay.” 
    Than fifty years of Europe better one New England ray!

Biography, too, is liable to the same objection; it should be autobiography.  Let us not, as the Germans advise, endeavor to go abroad and vex our bowels that we may be somebody else to explain him.  If I am not I, who will be?

But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition.  It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials.  What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still.  Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art.  Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—­nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.  Yet no era has been wholly dark, nor will we too hastily submit to the historian, and congratulate ourselves on a blaze of light.  If we could pierce the obscurity of those remote years, we should find it light enough; only there is not our day.  Some creatures are made to see in the dark.  There has always been the same amount of light in the world.  The new and missing stars, the comets and eclipses, do not affect the general illumination, for only our glasses appreciate them.  The eyes