We cannot consider those things happening remotely from us on the earth's surface, even now, without suffering them to partake somewhat of the property of by-gone days. It makes little difference whether the distance be that of meridians or of eras. When at sunrise we fancy some foreign friend beholding dawn upon the silver summits of the Alps, we are forced directly to remember that with him day is at the noon, and his sunrise has vanished with those of all the yesterdays,--so that even our friend becomes a being of the past; or when, bathed in the mellow air of an autumn afternoon, the sunshine falling on us like the light of a happy smile, and all the vaporous vistas melting in clouded sapphire, it occurs to us that possibly it is snowing on the Mackenzie River, and night has already darkened down over the wide and awful ice-fields,--then distance seems a paradox, and time and occasion mere phantasmagoria; there are no beings but ourselves, there is no moment but the present; all circumstance of the world becomes apparent to us only like pictures thrown into the perspective of the past. It requires the comprehensive vision of the poet to catch the light of existing scenes as they shift along the globe, and harmonize them with the instant;--whether he view "The Indian Drifting, knife in hand, His frail boat moored to A floating isle thick matted With large-leaved, low-creeping melon-plants, And the dark cucumber. He reaps and stows them, Drifting,--drifting. Round him, Round his green harvest-plot, Flow the cool lake waves: The mountains ring them";-- or whether, far across the continent, he chance to see "The ferry On the broad, clay-laden Lone Chorasmian stream: thereon, With snort and strain, Two horses, strongly swimming, tow The ferry-boat, with woven ropes To either bow Firm harnessed by the mane:--a chief With shout and shaken spear Stands at the prow, and guides them; but astern, The cowering merchants, in long robes, Sit pale beside their wealth Of silk-bales and of balsam-drops, Of gold and ivory, Of turquoise-earth and amethyst, Jasper and chalcedony, And milk-barred onyx-stones. The loaded boat swings groaning In the yellow eddies. The gods behold them,"-- the gods and the poets. But, except to these blest beholders, the inhabitants of the dead centuries are mere spectral shades; for it takes a poet's fancy to vitalize with warmth and breath again those things that, having apparently left no impress on their own generation, seem to have no more signification for this than the persons of the drama or the heroes of romance.