sacred only for what men did there. We are indeed a headlong race. We
keep our ruins behind us. Perhaps that is why we get somewhere. And yet,
what beauty blooms flowerlike to the backward gaze! Music and
poetry--all the deepest, purest sentiments of the heart--are fed greatly
upon the memory of the things that were but can never be again.
Mnemosyne is the mother of all the Muses.

I got up and went out. By the light of a thin moon, I found the place
"over there." An odd, pathetic little ruin it is, to be sure. Nothing
imposing about it. It doesn't compel through admiration: it woos through
pity--the great, impersonal kind of pity.

"A single little turret that remains
On the plains"--

Browning tells about all there is to tell about it, though he never
heard of it; only they called it a "bastion" in the old days--the
little square adobe blockhouse that won't stand much longer. One
crumbling bastion and two gaunt fragments of adobe walls in a waste of
sand beside the river--that's Fort Benton.

A thin pale grudging strip of moon lit it up: just the moon by which to
see ruins--a moon for backward looking and regrets. A full round
love-moon wouldn't have served at all.

Out of pure moon-haze I restored the walls of the house where the
bourgeois lived. The fireplace and the great mud chimney are still
there, and the smut of the old log fires still clings inside. The man
who sat before that hearth was an American king. A simple word of
command spoken in that room was the thunder of the law in the wilderness