and stars through Herschell's telescope, and saw that
they were worlds.

* * * * *

"If, according to some speculations, you could prove the world many
thousand years older than the Mosaic chronology, or if you could get
rid of Adam and Eve, and the apple, and serpent, still, what is to be
put up in their stead? or how is the difficulty removed? Things must
have had a beginning, and what matters it _when_ or _how_?

* * * * *

"I sometimes think that _man_ may be the relic of some higher
material being wrecked in a former world, and degenerated in the
hardship and struggle through chaos into conformity, or something
like it,--as we see Laplanders, Esquimaux, &c. inferior in the
present state, as the elements become more inexorable. But even then
this higher pre-Adamite supposititious creation must have had an
origin and a _Creator_--for a _creation_ is a more natural
imagination than a fortuitous concourse of atoms: all things remount
to a fountain, though they may flow to an ocean.

* * * * *

"Plutarch says, in his Life of Lysander, that Aristotle observes
'that in general great geniuses are of a melancholy turn, and
instances Socrates, Plato, and Hercules (or Heraclitus), as examples,
and Lysander, though not while young, yet as inclined to it when
approaching towards age.' Whether I am a genius or not, I have been
called such by my friends as well as enemies, and in more countries
and languages than one, and also within a no very long period of
existence. Of my genius, I can say nothing, but of my melancholy,
that it is 'increasing, and ought to be diminished.' But how?

"I take it that most men are so at bottom, but that it is only
remarked in the remarkable. The Duchesse de Broglio, in reply to a
remark of mine on the errors of clever people, said that 'they were
not worse than others, only, being more in view, more noted,
especially in all that could reduce them to the rest, or raise the
rest to them.' In 1816, this was.

"In fact (I suppose that) if the follies of fools were all set down
like those of the wise, the wise (who seem at present only a better
sort of fools) would appear almost intelligent.

* * * * *

"It is singular how soon we lose the impression of what ceases to be
_constantly_ before us: a year impairs; a lustre obliterates. There
is little distinct left withou