In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on h...is opening sense of beauty;--and you have Pericles and Phidias,--and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »
These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were,--if our bold ancestors who settl...ed this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrowheads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »