Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 9, No. 55, May, 1862 | Page 3

him, on the
Potomac, in the mountains of Virginia, down the valley of the
Mississippi, in the interiors of Kentucky and Tennessee, along the
seaboard, and on the Gulf coast. The combatants are hidden from each
other, but under the chieftain's eye the dozen armies are only the
squadrons of a single host, their battles only the separate conflicts of a
single field, the movements of the whole campaign only the evolutions
of a prolonged engagement. The spectacle is a good illustration of the
day. Under the magic of progress, war in its essence and vitality is
really diminishing, even while increasing in materiel and grandeur.
Neither time nor space will permit the old and tedious contests of
history to be repeated. Military science has entered upon a new era,
nearer than ever to the period when wars shall cease.
But to go on with a few more contrasts of the past with the present.
Once men wrote only in symbols, like wedges and arrow-heads, on
tiles and bricks, or in hieroglyphic pictures on obelisks and
sepulchres,--afterward in crude, but current characters on stone, metal,
wax, and papyrus. In a much later age appeared the farthest perfection
of the invention: books engrossed on illuminated rolls of vellum, and
wound on cylinders of boxwood, ivory, or gold,--and then put away
like richest treasures of art. What a difference between perfection then
and progress now! To-day the steam printing-press throws out its sheets
in clouds, and fills the world with books. Vast libraries are the vaulted

catacombs of modern times, in which the dead past is laid away, and
the living present takes refuge. The glory of costly scrolls is dimmed by
the illustrated and typographical wonders which make the bookstore a
gorgeous dream. Knowledge, no longer rare, no longer lies in
precarious accumulations within the cells of some poor monk's
crumbling brain, but swells up like the ocean, universal and
imperishable, pouring into the vacant recesses of all minds as the ocean
pours into the hollows under its shore. To-day, newspapers multiplied
by millions whiten the whole country every morning, like the hoar-frost;
and books, numerous and brilliant as the stars, seem by a sort of astral
influence to unseal the latent destinies of many an intellect, as by their
illumination they stimulate thought and activity everywhere.
Once art seemed to have reached perfection in the pictures and
sculptures of Greece and Rome. Yet now those master-pieces are not
only equalled on canvas and in fresco, but reproduced by tens of
thousands from graven sheets of copper, steel, and even blocks of
wood,--or, if modelled in marble or bronze, are remodelled by hundreds,
and set up in countless households as the household gods. It is the glory
of to-day that the sun himself has come down to be the rival and
teacher of artists, to work wonders and perform miracles in art. He is
the celestial limner who shall preserve the authentic faces of every
generation from now until the world is no more. He holds the mirror up
to Nature, paralyzes the fleeting phantom, by chemical subtilty, on the
burnished plate,--and there it is fixed forever. He prepares the optical
illusion of the stereoscope, so that through tiny windows we may look
as into fairy-land and find sections of this magnificent world modelled
in miniature.
Once men imagined the earth to be a flat and limited tract. Now they
realize that it is a ponderous ball floating in infinite ether. Once they
thought the sky was a solid blue concave, studded with blazing points,
an empire of fate, the gold-and-azure floor of the abode of gods and
spirits. Now all that is dissolved away; the wandering planets become
at will broad disks, like sisters of the moon; and countless millions of
stars are now mirrored in the same retina with which the Magi saw the
few thousands of the firmament that were visible from the plains of
Chaldea.
Once men were aware of nothing in the earth beneath its hills and

valleys and teeming soil. Now they walk consciously over the ruins of
old worlds; they can decipher the strange characters and read the
strange history graven on these gigantic tablets. The stony veil is rent,
and they can look inimitable periods back, and see the curious animals
which then moved up and down in the earth.
Once a glass bubble was a wonder for magnifying power. Now the
lenses of the microscope bring an inverted universe to light. Men can
look into a drop and discover an ocean crowded with millions of living
creatures, monsters untypified in the visible world, playing about as in
a great deep.
Once a Roman emperor prized a mysterious jewel because it brought
the gladiators contending in the arena closer to the imperial canopy.
Now observatories,