Explore "Westward Ho!" by Charles Kingsley on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
"Let us alone. What pleasure can we have To war with evil? Is there any peace In always climbing up the climbing wave? All things have rest, and ripen toward the grave In silence; ripen, fall, and cease: Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease. " TENNYSON.
Humboldt has somewhere a curious passage; in which, looking on some wretched group of Indians, squatting stupidly round their fires, besmeared with grease and paint, and devouring ants and clay, he somewhat naively remarks, that were it not for science, which teaches us that such is the crude material of humanity, and this the state from which we all have risen, he should have been tempted rather to look upon those hapless beings as the last degraded remnants of some fallen and dying race. One wishes that the great traveller had been bold enough to yield to that temptation, which his own reason and common sense presented to him as the real explanation of the sad sight, instead of following the dogmas of a so-called science, which has not a fact whereon to base its wild notion, and must ignore a thousand facts in asserting it.