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THE POETRY OF CHEMISTRY. 
“ There’s not one atom of yon earth 
But once was living man; 
Nor the minutest drop of rain, 
That hangeth in the thinnest cloud, 
But flowed in human veins.” 
Shelley. 
So pass and change the elements of the world. So 
separate and combine, 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 
mothers 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 ail 
the world in scenes of delicious beauty, and hedge round 
tne waking thoughts of men with wonder upon wonder. 
a The whole code of her laws may be written on the 
thumb-nail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling 
