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I am not a prophet, with promises of crowns and glories in my gift. But yet I will answer this queer question as fully as I can. I do not say there is no God. I do not say there is no "Heaven," nor that the soul is not immortal. There is not enough evidence to justify me in making such assertions. I only say, on those subjects, that I do not know. I do not know about those things.
There are here none of the modern and commonplace evidences of life and activity that shock the artistic sense in other towns. All is old, moribund, and picturesque. It lies here in the heart of the Guadarramas, lost and forgotten by the civilization of the age, muttering in its senile dream of the glories of an older world.
The French thus lost fifteen of the finest ships in their navy, the least of which carried sixty guns; but this was little more than the loss of the allies at Beachy Head. The impression made upon the public mind, accustomed to the glories and successes of Louis XIV., was out of all proportion to the results, and blotted out the memory of the splendid self-devotion of Tourville and his followers.
In our desire to show him all the glories of the spot, we carried him out at once, up the hillside, leaping across the brook, gathering pennyroyal and Indian posy as we went, past the sheep and on and up, until he, laughing, said: "Look here, I can't follow thee; besides, I think I've seen more of this life than thee have, and it isn't all so new to me! Come and sit down here; I'm tired."
And then follows a recital of his faded glories generally ending with a hint that a drink would be very acceptable. Even such a weakling was young Gourlay. His success in Edinburgh, petty as it was, turned his head, and became one of the many causes working to destroy him. All that summer at Barbie he swaggered and drank on the strength of it.
It was a part of her unexpectedness that she took the heavy literal view of Nick's behaviour; declared frankly, though without ill nature, that she had no patience with his mistake. She was horribly disappointed she had set her heart on his being a great statesman, one of the rulers of the people and the glories of England. What was so useful, what was so noble? how it belittled everything else!
Girard, nor Broad street, neither wonders of the Mint nor the glories of the Hall where the ghosts of our fathers sit always signing the Declaration; impressed the visitors so much as the splendors of the Chestnut street windows, and the bargains on Eighth street.
Well was it remembered how, only last year, at the great council fire of the whole tribe, when the runners brought the news of the aggressions of the whites on some of the southern tribes with whom they had been, in the years past, on friendly alliance, and the old men spake with bitterness and talked of the old glories of the red men, ere the paleface came with his firearms, and what was worse with his firewater, and hunted down and poisoned many of their forefathers, and drove back the rest of them toward the setting sun or northward to the regions of the bitter cold and frost, and how much better it would have been, they said, if their forefathers had listened to the fiery eloquence and burning words of Tecumseh and his brother the prophet, and joined in a great Indian confederacy, when they were numerous and strong to drive the white man back into the sea.
When for nearly forty years Rome had been deserted by the popes, who had betaken themselves in 1309 to a long residence at Avignon, France, and when the Eternal City was virtually without an imperial government the Teutonic emperors having likewise abandoned her she fell back upon the memories of her great past, recalling the glories of her ancient supremacy and the means whereby it had been established and maintained.
One chronicler, to whose unconscious humour I am infinitely indebted, dedicates his work to "the children of Chicago, who, if the Lord spares them until they shall have attained the allotted span of life, will see this city the greatest metropolis on the globe." That is a modest estimate, and it makes us feel the inadequacy of our poor speech to hymn the glories of Chicago.
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