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Show 186 Early Western Travels JV6L 26 tell nothing of these tumulL To them, as to us, they are veiled in mystery. Ages since, long ere the white- face came, while this fair land was yet the home of his fathers, the simple Indian stood before this venerable earth- heap, and gazed, and wondered, and turned away. But there is another reflection which, as we gaze upon these venerable tombs, addresses itself directly to our feelings, and bows them in humbleness. It is, that soon our memory and that of our own generation will, like that of other times and other men, have passed away; that when these frail tenements shall have been laid aside to moulder, the remembrance will soon follow them to the land of for-getfulness. Ah, if there be an object in all the wide universe of human desires for which the heart of man yearns with an intensity of craving more agonizing and deathless than for any other, it is that the memory should live after the poor body is dust. It was this eternal principle of our nature which reared the lonely tombs of Egypt amid the sands and barrenness of the desert. For ages untold have the massive and gloomy pyramids looked down upon the floods of the Nile, and generation after generation has passed away; yet their very existence still remains a mystery, and their origin points down our inquiry for beyond the grasp of human ken, into the boiling mists, the " wide involving shades " of centuries past. And yet how fondly did they who, with the toil, and blood, and sweat, and misery of ages, upreared these stupendous piles, anticipate [ 162] an immortality for their name which, like the effulgence of a golden eternity, should for ever linger around their summits! So was it with the ancient tomb- builders of this New World; so has it been with man in every stage of his existence, from the hour that the giant Babel first reared its dusky walls from the plains of Shinar down to the era of the present generation. And yet how hopeless, desperately, eternally |