One of the admirers of Goëthe, commenting on his characteristicexcellencies, has remarked that he is the most suggestive of writers.Were we to seek an epithet by which to describe the architectural remainsand historical monuments of England, with reference to theirimpression on the mind of an observer, perhaps no better could offeritself than that which has been thus applied to the works of the greatGerman. In the property of awakening reflection by bringing beforethe mind that series of events whose connection with the progress ofmodern civilization has been most direct and influential, and of recallingnames which, to the American at least, sound like household words,they stand unrivalled. Our manners, our customs, our national constitutionitself, may be said to have grown up beneath the shelter ofthese venerable structures, whose associations ally them in a mannerscarcely less striking with those wider developments of social and politicalreason in which we believe the welfare of our species to be involved.Who is there, that, standing within ‘the great hall of WilliamRufus,’ can forget how often it has been the theatre of those mightyconflicts, in which, however slowly and reluctantly, error and prejudicehave been compelled to relax their hold on the human mind? Dr.Johnson has spoken to us, in his usual stately phrase, of patriotism re-invigoratedand of piety warmed amid the scenes of Marathon andIona; but where is the Marathon which appeals to us so forcibly as thefield consecrated by the blood of a Hamden or a Falkland? and wherethe Iona which is so eloquent with recollections as the walls which haveechoed to the voices of a Ridley and a Barrow?
It is true indeed, that the recollections of many other lands, as associatedwith their monuments, lay much stronger hold upon the imaginationthan those of England. Of the former we might say that therewas about them more of the element of poetry; of the latter, that theyfurnish an ampler share of materials for reflection. One great moral,308‘the comprehensive text of the Hebrew preacher,’ the invariable ‘vanityof vanities,’ is alike inscribed upon all the vestiges of human greatness.For the rest, a serene and touching beauty lingers around and hallowsevery relic which attests the hand of Phidias, or marks the country ofPericles and Epaminondas. No lapse of time, no process of decay, willever wholly exorcise that spirit of stateliness and command which sitsenthroned amid the ruins of the ‘Eternal City,’ as her own Marius oncesate amid the ruins of a rival capital. But in all that regards a commonstandard of opinions, institutions and interests, and in the facilityof reasoning as respects these, from the experience and practice of onetime and people to those of another, we cannot but feel that a vast gulfhas interposed between our own age and that which is commemoratedby the monuments of Greece and Rome. The venerable genius of antiquity,seated among crumbling arches and broken columns, has butlittle to say to us respecting those questions which most deeply agitateand unceasingly perplex the busy and the thinking part of mankind atthe present day. No response are we to expect from that quarter,