Our age is retrospective.
Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs? Embosomed for a season in nature, whose floods of life stream around and through.
The foregoing generations beheld God and Nature face to face; we, through their eyes.
It writes biographies, histories, and criticism.
It builds the sepulchres of the fathers.
Our age is retrospective