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Show 156 Early Western Travels [ Vol a6 few years they will quite have disappeared. The practical utility of which they are available appears the only circumstance which has attracted attention to them. One has already become a public reservoir, and measures are in progress for applying the larger mound to a similar use, the first being insufficient for the growth of the city. It need not be said that such indifference of feeling to the only relics of a by- gone race which our land can boast, is not well in the citizens of St. Louis, and should exist no longer; nor need allusion be made to that eagerness of interest which the distant traveller, the man of literary taste and poetic fancy, or the devotee of abstruse science, never fails to betray for these mysterious monuments of the past, when, in his tour of the Far West, he visits St Louis; many a one, too, who has looked upon the century- mossed ruins of Europe, and to whose eye the castled crags of the Rhine are not unfamiliar. And surely, to the imaginative mind, there is an interest which attaches to these venerable beacons of departed time, enveloped as they are in mystery inscrutable; and from their origin, pointing, as they do, down the dim shadowy vista of ages of which the ken of man telleth not, there is an interest which hallows them even as the hoary piles of old Egypt are hallowed, and which feudal Europe, with all her [ 129] time- sustained battlements, can never boast. It is the mystery, the impenetrable mystery veiling these aged sepulchres, which gives them an interest for the traveller's eye. They are landmarks in the lapse of ages, beneath whose shadows generations have mouldered, and around whose summits a gone eternity plays 1 The ruined tower, the moss- grown abbey, the damp- stained dungeon, the sunken arch, the fairy and delicate fragments of the shattered peristyle of a classic land, or the beautiful frescoes of Herculaneum and Pompeii - around them time has indeed flung the silvery mantle of eld while he has |
