Generation after generation passes by, and is crumbled into sand as rocks
are crumbled by the sea. Each brought with it its heroes and its villains,
its triumphs and its sorrows; but the history is formless legend,
incredible and unintelligible; the figures of the actors are indistinct as
the rude ballad or ruder inscription, which may be the only authentic
record of them. We do not see the men and women, we see only the outlines
of them which have been woven into tradition as they appeared to the loves
or hatreds of passionate admirers or enemies. Of such times we know
nothing, save the broad results as they are measured from century to
century, with here and there some indestructible pebble, some law, some
fragment of remarkable poetry which has resisted decomposition. These
periods are the proper subject of the philosophic historian, and to him we
leave them. But there are others, a few, at which intellectual activity
was as great as it is now, with its written records surviving, in which
the passions, the opinions, the ambitions of the age are all before us,
where the actors in the great drama speak their own thoughts in their own
words, where we hear their enemies denounce them and their friends praise
them; where we are ourselves plunged amidst the hopes and fears of the
hour, to feel the conflicting emotions and to sympathize in the struggles
which again seem to live: and here philosophy is at fault.
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