direction in which they are rightest, and on goes the game again with
new whirl, for a generation or two more. The child with his sweet
pranks, the fool of his senses, commanded by every sight and sound,
without any power to compare and rank his sensations, abandoned to
a whistle or a painted chip, to a lead dragoon or a gingerbread-dog,
individualizing everything, generalizing nothing, delighted with every
new thing, lies down at night overpowered by the fatigue which this day
of continual pretty madness has incurred. But Nature has answered her
purpose with the curly, dimpled lunatic. She has tasked every faculty,
and has secured the symmetrical growth of the bodily frame by all these
attitudes and exertions,--an end of the first importance, which could
not be trusted to any care less perfect than her own. This glitter, this
opaline lustre plays round the top of every toy to his eye to insure
his fidelity, and he is deceived to his good. We are made alive and kept
alive by the same arts. Let the stoics say what they please, we do
not eat for the good of living, but because the meat is savory and
the appetite is keen. The vegetable life does not content itself with
casting from the flower or the tree a single seed, but it fills the
air and earth with a prodigality of seeds, that, if thousands perish,
thousands may plant themselves; that hundreds may come up, that tens may
live to maturity; that at least one may replace the parent. All things
betray the same calculated profusion. The excess of fear with which the
animal frame is hedged round, shrinking from cold, starting at sight
of a snake, or at a sudden noise, protects us, through a multitude of
groundless alarms, from some one real danger at last. The lover seeks in
marriage his private felicity and perfection, with no prospective end;
and nature hides in his happiness her own end, namely, progeny, or the
perpetuity of the race.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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