Читать книгу Revisiting the Earth - James Langdon Hill - Страница 11

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It is now only one hundred and eighty generations, as we used to be taught, since Adam, peace to his memory and his ashes, who was grandfather of us all. There are thus but one hundred and seventy-eight generations between us and him. This would take but one hundred and seventy-eight father-to-son steps to bring us to the original family home in the Garden of Eden. There are only one hundred and eighty life-times to review. The grandfather of Noah, who was six hundred years old when he encountered the flood, was Methuselah, who remembered Adam. If our line of ancestry is so short, and if all the progress we have made has been accomplished within a history so brief, it is little wonder that the transformations to be witnessed in one of these not numerous generations are so incredible and so instructive.

I do not know, but I may class traveling among our duties. It opens new spheres of thought and observation and places us in new relations to mankind and makes us better students of human nature. Leisure is sweet to the taste and for that reason it soon palls. Pleasure is a by-product. Enjoyment is greatest when it is incidental to some well-advised quest. Idleness is the least pleasure of a holiday. To make high festival of a pilgrimage to a shrine is more common in the older nations than in our own. It is the habit of the human mind to love that which is memorial in its character. We cannot, as Longfellow says, buy with gold the old associations. "He that is searching for rare and remote things will neglect those that are obvious and familiar. It is remarkable," continues Dr. Johnson in the preface to his dictionary, "that in reviewing my collection of words I found the word 'sea' unexemplified." I have had many vacations, in places wide apart. Having gone further and fared worse, returning to what is nearer, having an inspiration of beauty upon it, I say, touching Revisiting the Earth, as David declared of Goliath's sword, There is none like that, give me it. Never did a child perform an errand with more alacrity than I executed this mission.