87 



THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. 



There's not one atom of yon earth but once was living man, 

 Nor the minutest drop, that hangethin its thinnest cloud, 

 But flowed in human veins. 



Shellet. 



So pass and change the elements of the world. So separate and com- 

 bine, so decay and revivify, so come and go the creatures of the earth 

 and air, and in due time all the particles of the rounded world pass 

 through the life current of the human heart. Nature is a great 

 laboratory, a necromantic palace of mutation. Yet out of all this 

 passing and repassing, this flitting and fading of her dead and living 

 children, she still preserves the old familiar face, and looks upon us 

 with the same sweet mother's smile which gladdened the hearts of the 

 old thinkers, and cheered the builders of the ancient temples. Nature 

 has but a few simple materials, and neither crucible nor alembic in 

 which to elaborate her new forms, and yet with this poverty of means 

 does she trick out all the world in scenes of delicious beauty, and 

 hedge round the waking thoughts of men with wonder upon wonder. 

 " The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumb-nail, or 

 the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook 

 admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on 

 the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup ex- 

 plains the formation of the simpler shells ; the addition of matter 

 from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms ; and yet 

 so poor is nature with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the 

 end of the universe, she has but one stuff — but one stuff with its two 

 ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she 

 will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays 

 the same properties." * 



When men woke up from barbarism and night, and began to con- 

 emplate the beauty of the world, they saw that amid the multiplicity 



* Emerson's Essays, Second Series, p. 121, 



