That pale-faced drudge of Time opposite me there, that weariless sexton whose callous hands bury our rosy hours in the irrevocable past, is even now reaching forward to a moment as rich in life, in character, and thought, as full of opportunity, as any since Adam.  This little isthmus that we are now standing on is the point to which martyrs in their triumphant pain, prophets in their fervor, and poets in their ecstasy, looked forward as the golden future, as the land too good for them to behold with mortal eyes; it is the point toward which the faint-hearted and desponding hereafter will look back as the priceless past when there was still some good and virtue and opportunity left in the world.

The people who feel their own age prosaic are those who see only its costume.  And that is what makes it prosaic—­that we have not faith enough in ourselves to think our own clothes good enough to be presented to posterity in.  The artists fancy that the court dress of posterity is that of Van Dyck’s time, or Caesar’s.  I have seen the model of a statue of Sir Robert Peel,—­a statesman whose merit consisted in yielding gracefully to the present,—­in which the sculptor had done his best to travesty the real man into a make-believe Roman.  At the period when England produced its greatest poets, we find exactly the reverse of this, and we are thankful that the man who made the monument of Lord Bacon had genius to copy every button of his dress, everything down to the rosettes on his shoes, and then to write under his statue, “Thus sat Francis Bacon”—­not “Cneius Pompeius”—­“Viscount Verulam.”  Those men had faith even in their own shoe-strings.

After all, how is our poor scapegoat of a nineteenth century to blame?  Why, for not being the seventeenth, to be sure!  It is always raining opportunity, but it seems it was only the men two hundred years ago who were intelligent enough not to hold their cups bottom-up.  We are like beggars who think if a piece of gold drop into their palm it must be counterfeit, and would rather change it for the smooth-worn piece of familiar copper.  And so, as we stand in our mendicancy by the wayside, Time tosses carefully the great golden to-day into our hats, and we turn it over grumblingly and suspiciously, and are pleasantly surprised at finding that we can exchange it for beef and potatoes.  Till Dante’s time the Italian poets thought no language good enough to put their nothings into but Latin,—­and indeed a dead tongue was the best for dead thoughts,—­but Dante found the common speech of Florence, in which men bargained and scolded and made love, good enough for him, and out of the world around him made a poem such as no Roman ever sang.