Page:The Cornhill magazine (Volume 1).djvu/275

set bounds to intellect, and to aspirations which, when they are most largely achieved, do not always work for pure and useful ends; true, He does not permit us to become too impious in our pride by giving eternity to the Parthenons and telegraphs that we make such a noise about; but, all that is really good, and beautiful, and profitable for man, is everlastingly his. The lovely world that Adam beheld is not only the same to-day, it is created and given to us anew every day. What have we said about morning, which is born again (for us, for little ones, the ignorant, the blind, who could not see at all yesterday) three hundred and sixty-five times in a year—every time as fresh, and new, and innocent as that which first dawned over Eden? Now, considering how much iniquity and blindness all the nights have fallen upon, I must think this a bountiful arrangement, and one which need not make us unhappy. I love to think the air I breathe through my open window is the same that wandered through Paradise before our first mother breathed; that the primroses which grow to-day in our dear old woods are such as decked the bank on which she slept before sin and death came into the world; and that our children shall find them, neither better nor worse, when our names are clean forgotten. And is it nothing that if we have all death, we have all youth?—brand-new affections and emotions—a mind itself a new and separate creation, as much as is any one star among the rest? In the heavens there is a tract of light called the Milky Way, which to the common eye appears no more than a luminous cloud. But astronomers tell us that this vast river of light is a universe, in which individual stars are so many that they are like the sands on the shore. We cannot see each grain of sand here on Brighton beach, we cannot see the separate stars of the Milky Way, nor its suns and great planets, with all our appliances; and yet each of those orbs has its path, rolling along on its own business—a world. On learning which we are bewildered with astonishment and awe. But here below is another shifting cloud, called "the human race." Thousands of years it has swept over the earth in great tracts, coming and going. And this vast quicksand is made up of millions and millions of individual I's, each a man, a separate, distinct creation; each travelling its path, which none other can travel; each bearing its own life, which is no other's—a world. I think this ought to strike us with as much awe as that other creation. I think we ought to be filled with as much gratitude for our own planetary being as astonishment at the spectacle of any Milky Way whatever. And I only wish that we, the human race, shone in the eyes of heaven with the light of virtue like another Milky Way. Created, then, so purely of ourselves, this is the result with regard to the natural world about us: that with our own feelings and affections, we discover, each for himself, all the glory of the universe. And therefore is nature eternal, unchangeable—that all men may know the whole goodness of God. Whose eyes but mine first saw the sun set? Some old Chaldean, some dweller in drowned Atlantis, imagined the feelings of Adam when he