We moderns, on the other hand, are eminently fortunate, because within the cycle of our thoughts revolves the entire epos of the ancient world.  Here there is the element of completeness:  it is our privilege to look upon the final tableau before the curtain falls, to have gathered in the concluding no less than the prelusive signals, to have seen where the last stone in the arch bottoms upon a real basis.  Let it be that to us it is a drama of shadows; yet are none of the prominent features lost; indeed, they are rather magnified by the distance; our actors upon the ancient proscenium walk in buskins and look upon us out of masks whose significance has been intensified by remoteness in time.  This view of the case yields an ample refutation of those arguments frequently adduced of late, in certain quarters, to prove the inutility of classical studies.  Thus, it is urged, that, in every department of human knowledge, we transcend the most splendid acquirements of the ancients, and therefore that it is so much time wasted which we devote towards keeping up an acquaintance with antiquity.  But how is it that we so far overtop the ancients?  Simply by preserving our conscious connection with them, just as manhood towers above childhood through the remembered experiences of childhood.  As an evidence of this, we need only note the sudden impulse which modern civilization received through the revival of ancient literature.  As it is by resolving into constellations the nebulae, disconnected from the earth by vast intervals of space, that we conjecture the awful magnitude of the universe, so do we conjecture the magnitude of human life by resolving into distinct shapes the nebulous mist of antiquity separated from us by vast intervals in time.  The profoundest lessons, such as are heeded by the race, such as are universally intelligible, have this obliquity of origin.  Thus, in the distractions of the present, no relief is found through compensatory consolations from the present; but we turn to the figures of the past,—­figures caught in the mind, and held fixed, as in bas-relief,—­figures in the attitude of antagonistic strife or of sublime rest,—­figures that master our intellects as can none from the tumultuous present, (excepting the present of dreams,) and that out of their eternal repose anticipate for us contingencies that do not yet exist, but are representatively typified through such as have existed and passed away.

It is a fact well ascertained in physical geography, that the New World and the Old stand over against each other, not merely as antipodal opposites, but so corresponding in outline that a promontory in one is met by a gulf in the other, and sinuous seas by outstanding continents, (so that over against the Gulf of Mexico, for instance, is opposed the projection of Western Africa,) as if the gods had, in the registry of some important covenant, rent the earth in twain for indentures.  In this way, also, do the two great hemispheres of Time stand opposed; so that, from the shaping of the ancient, we may anticipate even the undeveloped conformation of the modern:  in place of the direct reality, which is of necessity wanting, we have the next best thing to guide us even in our most perilous coastings, namely, its well-defined analogue in the remote past.