ir imprisonment, rooted in the
ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced
order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the
cup of thought, are already dissipated: the maples and ferns are still
uncorrupt; yet no doubt when they come to consciousness they too will
curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth that we adult men
soon come to feel that their beautiful generations concern not us: we
have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us,
and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.

Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the
eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be
predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall
would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as
the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great
intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural
life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled
courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and
aboriginal as a white bear, omnipotent to its own ends, and is
directly related, there amid essences and billetsdoux, to Himmaleh
mountain-chains and the axis of the globe. If we consider how much
we are nature's, we need not be superstitious about towns, as if that
terrific or benefic force did not find us there also, and fashion
cities. Nature, who made the mason, made the house. We may easily hear
too much of rural influences. The cool disengaged air of natural objects
makes them enviable to us, chafed and irritable creatures with red
faces, and we think we shall be as grand as they if we camp out and eat
roots; but let us be men instead of woodchucks and the oak and the elm
shall gladly serve us, though we sit in chairs of ivory on carpets of
silk.

This guiding identity runs through all the surprises and contrasts of
the piece, and characterizes every law. Man carries the world in his
head, the whole astronomy and chemistry suspended in a thought. Because
the history of nature is charactered in his brain, therefore is he
the prophet and discoverer of her secrets. Every known fact in natural
science was divined by the presentiment of somebody, before it was
actually verified. A man does not tie his shoe without recognizing laws
which bind the farthest regions of nature: moon, plant, gas, crystal,
ar