myth, but as a history—the beginning of the human family in its Eden, and then a darkness is dispelled: then hope and peace are still mine (and Poetry also) for if this Proem of human history may stand approved, then on the skirts of the thickest gloom a brightness lingers. If there was once a Paradise on earth, then I know how to see and acknowledge, as the gifts of God, whatever is good and fair in my actual lot, and whatever is graceful; and whatever is in nature beautiful, and whatever it is which art elaborates, and which genius exalts. In all these graces of life I see so many vouchers for the fact that this Earth once had a Paradise.
And this is not all—for, with the same Mosaic belief as my ground of speculation—my turret of observation, I may look upwards and around me upon the sparkling fields of the infinite, and then am free to surmise, what I have reason to infer from an actual instance; and thus I may assuredly believe that, upon millions of worlds, there are now, and will be, gardens of God, where all is fair and good.
