And to think this goes on every day, and every day has been repeated for a thousand years! Generally, though, we don’t like to think about that, as Mr. Kingsley has remarked, among others; for when he wrote, “Is it not a grand thought, the silence and permanence of nature amid the perpetual noise and flux of human life!--a grand thought, that one generation goeth and another cometh, and the earth abideth for ever?” he also meant, “Isn’t it a melancholy thought?” For my part, I believe this reflection to be the fount of all that melancholy which is in man. I speak in the broadest sense, meaning that whereas whenever you find a man you find a melancholy animal, this is the secret of his melancholy. The thought is so common and so old; it has afflicted so many men in so many generations with a sort of philosophical sadness, that it comes down to us like an hereditary disease, of which we have lost the origin, and almost the consciousness. It is an universal disposition to melancholy madness, in short. Savages who run wild in woods are not less liable to its influence than we who walk in civilized Pall Mall. On the contrary, a savage of any brains at all is the most melancholy creature in the world. Not Donizetti, nor Mendelssohn, nor Beethoven himself ever composed such sad songs as are drummed on tom-toms, or piped through reeds, or chanted on the prairies and lagoons of savage land. No music was ever conceived within the walls of a city so profoundly touching as that which Irish pipers and British harpers made before an arch was built in England. Now this bears out our supposition; for the savage with the tom-tom, the piper with his pipe, the harper with his harp, lived always in sight of nature. Their little fussy lives and noisy works were ever in contrast with its silence and permanence; change and decay with the constant seasons and the everlasting hills. Who cannot understand the red man’s reverence for inanimate nature read by this light--especially his reverence for the setting sun? For the night cometh, reminding him of his own little candle of an existence, while he knows that the great orb has risen upon a hundred generations of hunters, and will rise upon a hundred more. As for him and his works, his knife will be buried with him, and there an end of him and his works.