Under the Trees and ElsewhereMabie, Hamilton Wright
History
Under the Trees and Elsewhere
Mabie, Hamilton Wright
Essays; Natural history -- Outdoor books
Now go we in content
To liberty and not to banishment.
I have sometimes entertained myself by trying to imagine the
impressions which our modern life would make upon some sensitive mind
of a remote age. I have fancied myself rambling about New York with
Montaigne, and taking note of his shrewd, satirical comment. I can
hardly imagine him expressing any feeling of surprise, much less any
sentiment of admiration; but I am confident that under a masque of
ironical self-complacency the old Gascon would find it difficult to
repress his astonishment, and still more difficult to adjust his mind
to evident and impressive changes. I have ventured at times to imagine
myself in the company of another more remote and finely organised
spirit of the past, and pictured to myself the keen, dispassionate
criticism of Pericles on the things of modern habit and creation; I
have listened to his luminous interpretations of the changed conditions
which he saw about him; I have noted his unconcern toward the merely
material advances of society, his penetrative insight into its
intellectual and moral developments. A mind so capacious and open, a
nature so trained and poised, could not be otherwise than
self-contained and calm even in the presence of changes so vast and
manifold as those which have transformed society since the days of the
great Athenian; but even he could not be quite unmoved if brought face
to face with a life so unlike that with which he had been familiar;
there must come, even to one who feels the mastery of the soul over all
conditions, a certain sense of wonder and awe.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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