Miscellaneous Essays and Discourses (Classic Reprint)

Book excerpt: Excerpt from Miscellaneous Essays and Discourses We may well suppose that the first feeling of Adam was a feeling of mystery. With the conviction, elementary in every mind, that there can be no effect without a cause; with the consciousness of his own inexplicable being; creation, in its original brightness, bursting at once upon his view, and indicating itself through all his senses; he must have felt that mystery enveloped himself and all that he beheld. Accordingly, "As new waked from soundest sleep," said he, "Soft on the flowery bank I found me laid, Straight toward heaven my wandering eyes I turned, And gazed awhile the ample sky. Thou sun, said I, fair light, And thou enlightened earth, so fresh and gray, And ye that live and move, fair creatures, tell, Tell, if ye saw, how came I thus, how here." That was a sublime moment - such an one as none of his descendants, under the deadening influence of the familiarity attendant on gradual perception, can ever enjoy. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.