live, but by an infinite variety of life. The same
historic facts, viewed in different lights, or brought into connexion
with other facts, according to endless diversities of permutation and
combination, furnish grounds for such eternal successions of new
speculations as make the facts themselves virtually new. The same Hebrew
words are read by different sets of vowel points, and the same
hieroglyphics are deciphered by keys everlastingly varied.

To us we repeat that oftentimes it seems as though the _science_ of
history were yet scarcely founded. There will be such a science, if at
present there is not; and in one feature of its capacities it will
resemble chemistry. What is so familiar to the perceptions of man as the
common chemical agents of water, air, and the soil on which we tread?
Yet each one of these elements is a mystery to this day; handled, used,
tried, searched experimentally, in ten thousand ways--it is still
unknown; fathomed by recent science down to a certain depth, it is still
probably by its destiny unfathomable. Even to the end of days, it is
pretty certain that the minutest particle of earth--that a dewdrop,
scarcely distinguishable as a separate object--that the slenderest
filament of a plant will include within itself secrets inaccessible to
man. And yet, compared with the mystery of man himself, these physical
worlds of mystery are but as a radix of infinity. Chemistry is in this
view mysterious and spinosistically sublime--that it is the science of
the latent in all things, of all things as lurking in all. Within the
lifeless flint, within the silent pyrites, slumbers an agony of
potential combustion. Iron is imprisoned in blood. With cold water (as
every child is now-a-days aware) you may lash a fluid into angry
ebullitions of heat; with hot water, as with the rod of Amram's son, you
may freeze a fluid down to the temperature of the Sarsar wind, provided
only that you regulate the pressure of the air. The sultry and
dissolving fluid shall bake into a solid, the petrific fluid shall melt
into a liquid. Heat shall freeze, frost shall thaw; and wherefore?
Simply because old things are brought together in new modes of
combination. And in endless instances beside we see the same Panlike
latency of forms and powers, which gives to the external world a
capacity of self-transformation, and of _polymorphosis_ absolutely
inexhaustible.

But the same capacity belongs to the facts of history. And we do