A magnificent tree can awe you with its grace, its beauty, its grandeur. All of that was true of the Wye Oak in Talbot County, which fell during a violent thunderstorm this week. But this particular tree had even more power over its onlookers. It humbled them.

Those lucky enough to have seen the 460-year-old tree describe a feeling of reverence stealing over them while in its presence. "It gives us a sense of our own mortality," says David Milarch, president of the Champion Tree Project International, an organization that seeks to clone America's oldest trees. "You have to be in reverence of something that has outlived us many times over. It's like going into an old cathedral. You're almost speechless."

Seeing something that is old, holding or touching it with our own hands, fires our imaginations like nothing else. It has the capacity to transport us, to connect us to a past that is otherwise abstract or inaccessible.

Those who saw the Wye Oak were transfixed by the notion that the tree not only had spanned the entire history of the United States, but had also predated it by 200 years.

If it is old, an object need not have been a living thing to so captivate us. Earlier this week came reports about the authenticity of a letter written by Thomas Jefferson that was found in Cecil County. The news exhilarated Jefferson scholars. The contents of the letter, which concerned religious freedom, might well have historic importance. But the physical manifestation of the letter has a potency that is separate from the substance of the words.

"There's an extraordinary thrill to pick up the original and know that Thomas Jefferson sat at his desk and composed that letter so carefully, so thoughtfully," says Edward Papenfuse, Maryland's state archivist. "Holding the original, that's a spine-tingling experience."

The Maryland State Archives has made hundreds of its historic documents available online, yet, Papenfuse says, "there's nothing the electronic record can do to reproduce the sense of the original, the power of the original."

Dennis Fiori, director of the Maryland Historical Society, knows from experience how right Papenfuse is. "We've taken the Star Spangled Banner off exhibit to preserve it, and people are absolutely crestfallen - even though you could never tell the difference between the original and the copy."

Fiori believes that in our time there is a special veneration for the older object itself because so much around us is impermanent. "In a world where everything is faux and throwaway, to touch something that survived this long, that was touched by someone hundreds of years ago, that resonates all the more."

It is a resonance that you feel visiting historic places like Gettysburg. You can read volumes and volumes about the battle, but nothing duplicates the emotional experience of being where the fighting and dying occurred.

"It's similar to why people care about Jerusalem," says Gary Vikan, director of the Walters Art Museum. "You walk where Jesus walked, and Muhammad and Solomon. You have a connectedness to the people of the past."

Older cities such as Baltimore provide many opportunities for that sort of tangible link to the past. Yesterday morning, Kathleen Kotarba, head of Baltimore's Commission for Historical and Architectural Preservation, walked part of the Frederick Douglass Trail in Fells Point, visiting some of the places the great anti-slavery leader lived and worked.

Kotarba says just being in historic buildings is reassuring to her.

"Most people find it comforting to experience timelines that outlast their own. It's reassuring that your own timeline is survived by a tree and outstanding architecture. I think it helps individuals feel they fit into a larger scheme. It places you in a big picture."

Perspective is what old objects, such as the Wye Oak, give us, Vikan agrees. In southern France, he once saw an olive tree that was more than 2,000 years old, old enough to have existed when Jesus lived.

An old thing, Vikan says, "invites you to think of all of the things that have come and gone during its existence, as if it were standing there and watching all of it pass by, like a wizened and wise grandmother who would say, 'Yes, 9/11 was terrible, and Pearl Harbor was terrible, but so was the Civil War.'

"We get caught up in our own time, but it's important to have that multigenerational perspective."

If Vikan anthropomorphizes the Wye Oak, he is far from alone. The fact that the tree was, in fact, a living thing, gives it an additional layer of poignancy that inanimate objects cannot possess. As Milarch says, the Wye Oak forces us to think about are own mortality, to realize how short our own time on this Earth is in the larger scheme of things.

The Wye Oak, after all, lived through at least 18 human generations.

More than enough to humble us.