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Ah! it is worth thinking over, for it shows how shrewd a giant Analysis is, and how fast he works in these days, now that he has got free and well fed; worth thinking over, I say, how our notions about these little atomies have changed during the last forty years. We used to find them sometimes washed up among the sea-sand on the wild Atlantic coast; and we were taught, in the days when old Dr.
History in the presence of such world-old atomies seemed an infant babbling of yesterday, in what it could say of the Rome of the Popes, the Rome of the Emperors, the Rome of the Republicans, the Rome of the Kings, the Rome of the Shepherds and Cowherds, through which a shaft sunk in the Forum would successively pierce in reaching those aboriginals whose sepulchres alone witnessed that they had ever lived.
He himself was in excellent spirits, and he said a cheery or facetious word here and there as he passed, which gave infinite delight to the thin and bloodless atomies under his care; for a joke from so serious and awful a being as the doctor is to a desponding patient better than all the drugs of the pharmacopoeia: it is as exquisite and sustaining as a divine text of promise to a religious enthusiast.
I knew that you could not say to yourself 'stereotomy' without being brought to think of atomies, and thus of the theories of Epicurus; and since, when we discussed this subject not very long ago, I mentioned to you how singularly, yet with how little notice, the vague guesses of that noble Greek had met with confirmation in the late nebular cosmogony, I felt that you could not avoid casting your eyes upward to the great nebula in Orion, and I certainly expected that you would do so.
She is the fancy's midwife, and she comes In shape no bigger than an agate stone On the fore-finger of an Alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies, Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep: Her waggon spokes made of long spinners' legs; The cover of the wings of grasshoppers; The traces of the smallest spider's web; The collars of the moonshine's watery beams; Her whip of cricket's bone; the lash of film; Her waggoner, a small grey coated gnat, Not half so big as a round little worm, Prickt from the lazy finger of a maid.
And once more, why are those strange microscopic atomies, the Diatomaceae and Infusoria, which fill every stagnant pool; which fringe every branch of sea-weed; which form banks hundreds of miles long on the Arctic sea-floor, and the strata of whole moorlands; which pervade in millions the mass of every iceberg, and float aloft in countless swarms amid the clouds of the volcanic dust; why are their tiny shells of flint as fantastically various in their quaint mathematical symmetry, as they are countless beyond the wildest dreams of the Poet?
Here is a bit of folklore, touched by Shakespeare's exquisite fancy, which shows what one boy listened to before the fire at Halloween: She comes In shape no bigger than an agate-stone On the fore-finger of an alderman, Drawn with a team of little atomies Athwart men's noses as they lie asleep; Her waggon-spokes made of long spinners' legs, The cover of the wings of grasshoppers, The traces of the smallest spider's web, The collars of the moonshine's watery beams, Her whip of cricket's bone, the lash of film, Her waggoner a small grey-coated gnat, * Her chariot is an empty hazel nut Made by the joiner squirrel, or old grub, Time out o' mind the fairies' coachmakers.
Its movables were ugly old chairs with worn-out seats, and ugly old chairs without any seats; a threadbare patternless carpet, a maimed table, a crippled wardrobe, a lean set of fire-irons like the skeleton of a set deceased, a washing-stand that looked as if it had stood for ages in a hail of dirty soapsuds, and a bedstead with four bare atomies of posts, each terminating in a spike, as if for the dismal accommodation of lodgers who might prefer to impale themselves.
The soldiery soon feel where their home is, and feel the pride of atomies in unitive power, when they are sneered at, hooted, pelted, stabbed upon a gross misinterpretation of the slightest of moral offences, shamefully abused for doing their duty with a considerate sense of it, and too accurately divided from the inhabitants of the land they hold.
On that leg grows, amid another copse of the grey polypes, a delicate straw-coloured Sertularia, branch on branch of tiny double combs, each tooth of the comb being a tube containing a living flower; on another leg another Sertularia, coarser, but still beautiful; and round it again has trained itself, parasitic on the parasite, plant upon plant of glass ivy, bearing crystal bells, each of which, too, protrudes its living flower; on another leg is a fresh species, like a little heather-bush of whitest ivory, and every needle leaf a polype cell let us stop before the imagination grows dizzy with the contemplation of those myriads of beautiful atomies.
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