Nations ten thousand years before these States, and many times ten thousand years before these States, Garnerād clusters of ages that men and women like us grew up and travelād their course and passād on, What vast-built cities, what orderly republics, what pastoral tribes and nomads, What histories, rulers, heroes, perhaps transcending all others, What laws, customs, wealth, arts, traditions, What sort of marriage, what costumes, what physiology and phrenology, What of liberty and slavery among them, what they thought of death and the soul, Who were witty and wise, who beautiful and poetic, who brutish and undevelopād, Not a mark, not a record remainsā āand yet all remains.
O I know that those men and women were not for nothing, any more than we are for nothing, I know that they belong to the scheme of the world every bit as much as we now belong to it.