Created, then, so purely of ourselves, this is the result with regard to the natural world about us: that with our own feelings and affections, we _discover_, each for himself, all the glory of the universe. And therefore is nature eternal, unchangeable--that all men may know the whole goodness of God. Whose eyes but mine first saw the sun set? Some old Chaldean, some dweller in drowned Atlantis, imagined the feelings of Adam when _he_ first saw the sun go down; ever since when, this poetical imagining has been going about the world, and people have envied Adam that one grandest chance of getting a “sensation.” Why, the Chaldean was Adam! I’m Adam! The sun was created with me, with you; and by and by, when we had got over the morning of infancy, we sat on a wall, in a field, on a hill, at our own little bedroom window, and our childish eyes being by that time opened, we saw the sun go down for the first time. Nor are these pleasures and advantages confined to the external world, to the sensations it inspires, or the influence it exerts upon us. No human passion, no emotion, the fiercest or the tenderest, comes to us at second hand. The experience and observation of a thousand years, all the metaphysical, and poetical, and dramatic books that ever were written, cannot add a jot to the duration or intensity of any emotion of ours. They may exercise it, but they cannot form it, nor instruct it; nor, were they fifty times as many and as profound, could they dwarf it. It lies in our hearts an original creation, complete, alone: like my life and yours. Now see how this arrangement works. When, dear madam, your little Billy was born, all that wondering delight, that awful tremor of joy, which possessed the heart of the first mother, was _yours_. You may have seen a piece of sculpture called the First Cradle. There sits Eve, brooding over her two boys, rocking them backward and forward in her arms and on her knees--wondering, awe-full, breathless with joy, drowned in a new flood of love. “Ah!” says the tender, child-loving female spectator, “what would not one give to have been that first mother, to have made with one’s arms the first cradle!” Ignorant soul! One would think, to hear her talk, that the gifts of heaven grow threadbare by course of time, and that in 1860 we have only the rags thereof! Don’t believe it, for there is another side to the question! If the gifts and rewards of heaven are paid in new coin, minted for you, with your effigies stamped upon it, so are the punishments. The flight of Cain when Abel was killed--Bill Sykes’s was every way as terrible; and any incipient poisoner who may happen to read this page may assure himself, that his new and improved process of murder--whatever advantages it may otherwise offer--is not specific against the torments of him who first shed blood: no, nor against any one of them. FOOTNOTES: