never read, and there, in the "Sylvarum Liber," I came upon a passage
as grand as anything in "Paradise Lost,"--his description of Plato's
archetypal man, the vast ideal of the human race, eternal, incorrupt,
coeval with the stars, dwelling either in the sidereal spaces, or among
the Lethean mansions of souls unborn, or pacing the unexplored confines
of the habitable globe. There stood the majestic image, veiled in a dead
language, yet still visible; and it was as if one of the poet's own
sylvan groves had been suddenly cut down, and opened a view of Olympus.
Then all these present fascinating trivialities of war and diplomacy
ebbed away, like Greece and Rome before them, and there seemed nothing
real in the universe but Plato's archetypal man.

Indeed, it is the same with all contemporary notorieties. In all free
governments, especially, it is the habit to overrate the _dramatis
personae_ of the hour. How empty to us are now the names of the great
politicians of the last generation, as Crawford and Lowndes!--yet it
is but a few years since these men filled in the public ear as large a
space as Clay or Calhoun afterwards, and when they died, the race of the
giants was thought ended. The path to oblivion of these later idols
is just as sure; even Webster will be to the next age but a mighty
tradition, and all that he has left will seem no more commensurate with
his fame than will his statue by Powers. If anything preserves the
statesmen of to-day, it will be only because we are coming to a contest
of more vital principles, which may better embalm the men. Of all gifts,
eloquence is the most short-lived. The most accomplished orator fades
forgotten, and his laurels pass to some hoarse, inaudible Burke,
accounted rather a bore during his lifetime, and possessed of a faculty
of scattering, not convincing, the members of the House. "After all,"
said the brilliant Choate, with melancholy foreboding, "a book is the
only immortality."