In that long aqueduct which brings the water of life down to us from its far sources in the Past, though many have done honest day-labor in building it, yet the keystone that unites the arch of every period is engraved with the name of the greatest man alone. These are our landmarks, and mentally we measure by these rather than by any scheme of Chronology. If we think of Philosophy, we think of four or five great names, and so of Poetry, Astronomy, and the rest. Geology may give what age she will to the globe; it matters not, it will still be only so many great men old; and wanting these, it is in vain that Egypt and Assyria show us their long bead-roll of vacant centuries. It is in the life of its great men that the life and thought of a people becomes statuesque, rises into poetry, and makes itself sound out clearly in rhythm and harmony. These great persons get all the fame and all the monuments like the generals of armies, though _we_ may lead the forlorn hope, or make a palpitating bridge with our bodies in the trenches. Rank and file may grumble a little--but it is always so, and always must be so. Fame would not be fame if it were or could be divided infinitesimally, and every man get his drachm and scruple. It is good for nothing unless it come in a lump. And besides, if every man got a monument or an epitaph who felt quite sure he deserved it, would marble hold out, or Latin? The fame of a great poet is made up of the sum of all the appreciations of many succeeding generations, each of which he touches at some one point. He is like a New World into which explorer after explorer enters, one to botanize, one to geologize, one to ethnologize, and each bringing back his report. His great snowy mountains perhaps only one man in a century goes to the top of and comes back to tell us how he saw from them at once the two great oceans of Life and Death, the Atlantic out of which we came, the Pacific toward which we tend.