Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 1Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
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Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches — Volume 1
Macaulay, Thomas Babington Macaulay, Baron
English essays
fail with wakefulness and tears, and ache for the dark house and the
long sleep,--there is exhibited, in its noblest form, the immortal
influence of Athens.
The dervise, in the Arabian tale, did not hesitate to abandon to his
comrade the camels with their load of jewels and gold, while he retained
the casket of that mysterious juice which enabled him to behold at
one glance all the hidden riches of the universe. Surely it is no
exaggeration to say that no external advantage is to be compared with
that purification of the intellectual eye which gives us to contemplate
the infinite wealth of the mental world, all the hoarded treasures of
its primeval dynasties, all the shapeless ore of its yet unexplored
mines. This is the gift of Athens to man. Her freedom and her power
have for more than twenty centuries been annihilated; her people have
degenerated into timid slaves; her language into a barbarous jargon;
her temples have been given up to the successive depredations of Romans,
Turks, and Scotchmen; but her intellectual empire is imperishable. And
when those who have rivalled her greatness shall have shared her fate;
when civilisation and knowledge shall have fixed their abode in distant
continents; when the sceptre shall have passed away from England;
when, perhaps, travellers from distant regions shall in vain labour to
decipher on some mouldering pedestal the name of our proudest chief;
shall hear savage hymns chaunted to some misshapen idol over the ruined
dome of our proudest temple; and shall see a single naked fisherman wash
his nets in the river of the ten thousand masts;--her influence and
her glory will still survive,--fresh in eternal youth, exempt from
mutability and decay, immortal as the intellectual principle from which
they derived their origin, and over which they exercise their control.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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