Quotation by Henry David Thoreau

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These, and such as these, must be our antiquities, for lack of human vestiges. The monuments of heroes and the temples of the gods which may once have stood on the banks of this river are now, at any rate, returned to dust and primitive soil. The murmur of unchronicled nations has died away along these shores, and once more Lowell and Manchester are on the trail of the Indian.

Henry David Thoreau

Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862), U.S. philosopher, author, naturalist. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), in The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, vol. 1, p. 264, Houghton Mifflin (1906).

Thoreau here expresses the widespread contemporary belief—associated with the "translation of empire" (translatio imperii) theme—that North America had had a highly civilized Native American prehistory from which it had fallen back into primitivism.

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