ng thus passed gradually through all the orders and fields of
creation, and traversed that goodly line of God's happy creatures who
"leap not, but express a feast, where all the guests sit close, and
nothing wants," without finding any deficiency which human invention
might supply, nor any harm which human interference might mend, we come
at last to set ourselves face to face with ourselves, expecting that in
creatures made after the image of God we are to find comeliness and
completion more exquisite than in the fowls of the air and the things
that pass through the paths of the sea.

But behold now a sudden change from all former experience. No longer
among the individuals of the race is there equality or likeness, a
distributed fairness and fixed type visible in each, but evil diversity,
and terrible stamp of various degradation; features seamed with
sickness, dimmed by sensuality, convulsed by passion, pinched by
poverty, shadowed by sorrow, branded with remorse; bodies consumed with
sloth, broken down by labor, tortured by disease, dishonored in foul
uses; intellects without power, hearts without hope, minds earthly and
devilish; our bones full of the sin of our youth, the heaven revealing
our iniquity, the earth rising up against us, the roots dried up
beneath, and the branch cut off above; well for us only, if, after
beholding this our natural face in a glass, we desire not straightway to
forget what manner of men we be.

Sec. 2. What room here for idealization.

Herein there is at last something, and too much, for that short stopping
intelligence and dull perception of ours to accomplish, whether in
earnest fact, or in the seeking for the outward image of beauty:--to
undo the devil's work, to restore to the body the grace and the power
which inherited disease has destroyed, to return to the spirit the
purity, and to the intellect the grasp that they had in Paradise. Now,
first of all, this work, be it observed is in no respect a work of
imagination. Wrecked we are, and nearly all to pieces; but that little
good by which we are to redeem ourselves is to be got out of the old
wreck, beaten about and full of sand though it be; and not out of that
desert island of pride on which the devils split first, and we after
them: and so the only restoration of the body that we can reach is not
to be coined out of our fancies, but to be collected out of such
uninjured and bright vestiges of the old seal as we can find and