Page:Sir Walter Raleigh by Thoreau, Henry David,.djvu/89

This page has been validated.

I'll ne'er believe that the least flow'r that pranks
Our garden borders, or the common banks,
And the least stone, that in her warming lap
Our kind nurse Earth doth covetously wrap,
Hath some peculiar virtue of its own,
And that the glorious stars of heav'n have none.

Nor is the following brief review and exaltation of the subject of all history unworthy of a place in this History of the World:

"Man, thus compounded and formed by God, was an abstract, or model, or brief story in the universal: . . . for out of the earth and dust was formed the flesh of man, and therefore heavy and lumpish; the bones of his body we may compare to the hard rocks and stones, and therefore strong and durable; of which Ovid:

Inde genus durum sumus experiensque laborum,
Et documenta damus, qua simus origine nati:

From thence our kind hard-hearted is,
Enduring pain and care,
Approving, that our bodies of
A stony nature are.

His blood, which disperseth it self by the branches of veins through all the body, may be resembled to those waters, which are carried by brooks and rivers over all the

[ 63 ]