ggs,--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
poly-phloesboean 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. Did Sir Isaac think what he was
saying when he made _his_ speech about the ocean,--the child and the
pebbles, you know? Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble? Of
a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space
before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has
watched it until now! A body which knows all the currents of force that
traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of
Saturn and the belt of Orion! A body from the contemplation of which an
archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of
corollaries! A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its
every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

So,--to return to _our_ walk by the ocean,--if all that poetry has
dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics have
driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed in
the fancies of women,--if the dreams of colleges and convents and
boarding-schools,--if every human feeling that sighs, or smiles, or
curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their innumerable
images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat,--the epic that held
them all, though its letters filled the zodiac, would be but a cupful
from the infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies that rolls through
the universe.

[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he received
this. He did not swallow it at once, neither did he reject it; but he
took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried it off with him to his
hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at his leisure.]

--Here is another remark ma