|
|
Article: Babylon and Anglo-Saxon England.
- Article from:
- Studies in the Literary Imagination
- Article date:
- March 22, 2003
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2003 Georgia State University, Department of English. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
|
The instinct of the mind, the purpose of nature, betrays itself in
the
use we make of the signal narrations of history. Time dissipates to
shining ether the solid angularity of facts. No anchor, no cable, no
fences avail to keep a fact a fact. Babylon, Troy, Tyre, Palestine,
and
even early Rome are passing already into fiction. The Garden of Eden,
the sun standing still in Gibeon, is poetry thenceforward to all
nations. Who cares what the fact was, when we have made a
constellation
of it to hang in heaven an immortal sign?
-- Emerson, "History" 116
In his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) ...