Beware
of rash criticisms; the rough and stringent fruit you condemn may
be an autumn or a winter pear, and that which you picked up beneath
the same bough in August may have been only its worm-eaten
windfalls. Milton was a Saint-Germain with a graft of the roseate
Early-Catherine. Rich, juicy, lively, fragrant, russet skinned old
Chaucer was an Easter-Beurre; the buds of a new summer were
swelling when he ripened.
- There is no power I envy so much--said the divinity-student--as
that of seeing analogies and making comparisons. I don't
understand how it is that some minds are continually coupling
thoughts or objects that seem not in the least related to each
other, until all at once they are put in a certain light, and you
wonder that you did not always see that they were as like as a pair
of twins. It appears to me a sort of miraculous gift.
[He is rather a nice young man, and I think has an appreciation of
the higher mental qualities remarkable for one of his years and
training. I try his head occasionally as housewives try eggs,--
give it an intellectual shake and hold it up to the light, so to
speak, to see if it has life in it, actual or potential, or only
contains lifeless albumen.]
You call it MIRACULOUS,--I replied,--tossing the expression with my
facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear.--Two men are walking by
the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with
which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the
other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all,--
and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession! It is the ocean
that is the miracle, my infant apostle! Nothing is clearer than
that all things are in all things, and that just according to the
intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many
in the one and the one in the many.
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