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All the particular ideas of existence, knowledge, will, power, and motion, &c., being ideas derived from the operations of our minds, we attribute all of them to all sorts of spirits, with the difference only of degrees; to the utmost we can imagine, even infinity, when we would frame as well as we can an idea of the First Being; who yet, it is certain, is infinitely more remote, in the real excellency of his nature, from the highest and perfectest of all created beings, than the greatest man, nay, purest seraph, is from the most contemptible part of matter; and consequently must infinitely exceed what our narrow understandings can conceive of Him.
There it all lay beneath us like a map; its thousand hues toned down harmoniously into each other by the summer haze, and 'the eye was not filled with seeing, nor the spirit with the intoxicating sight of infinitely various life and form in perfectest repose. I was the first to break the silence. 'Claude, well-beloved, will you not sketch a little? No answer.
Our old friend was, after all, but illiterate; our modern friend shall be a man educated in all seemly knowledge; he shall, in short, be that blessed being, a clergyman of the Church of England! And now, in what perfectest manner does he in this lower world get his godlike work done and put out of hand? Heavens! in the strangest of manners.
"Paul's Walk," he writes, "is the land's epitome, or you may call it the lesser isle of Great Britain. It is more than this it is the whole world's map, which you may here discern in its perfectest motion, jostling and turning. It is a heap of stones and men, with a vast confusion of languages; and were the steeple not sanctified, nothing could be liker Babel.
He is like a dull carrier's horse, that will go a whole week together, but never out of a foot pace; and he that sets forth on the Saturday shall overtake him. Is the land's epitome, or you may call it the lesser isle of Great Britain. It is more than this, the whole world's map, which you may here discern in its perfectest motion, justling and turning.
And so the Leader of them all was served in His day; and that purest, perfectest, noblest, loftiest, most utterly self-oblivious, and God-and-man-devoted life that ever was lived upon earth, was disposed of in this extremely simple method, so comforting to the complacency of the critics either 'He is beside Himself, or 'He hath a devil.
Now, in that respite the thing that will occur, 'tis for thee to see and mark; sure, never will reverse of things be more complete, and the other side of the picture more rapidly exhibited, if all go as I conceive and plot, and the trap be not premature nor too perfect for the trappers; as the poet has declared: "Ye that intrigue, to thy slaves proper portions adapt; Perfectest plots burst too often, for all are not apt."
It was upbraided to Demosthenes by an envious surly knave, that his Orations did smell like the sarpler or wrapper of a foul and filthy oil-vessel. For this cause interpret you all my deeds and sayings in the perfectest sense; reverence the cheese-like brain that feeds you with these fair billevezees and trifling jollities, and do what lies in you to keep me always merry.
"Massah Hugh de perfectest massah," he said, "and Miss Ellis a little more so;" adding that though "Canaan was a mighty nice place, he 'sumed he'd rather not go thar jist yet, but live a leetle longer to see them 'joy themselves. Thar they comes dat's miss in gray.
After five days of troubled yet joyous waiting, it came the happy "climax," as the Prince called it in a letter to Baron Stockmar and then that perfectest flower of human life, whether in palace or cottage, a pure and noble love, burst into full and glorious bloom in each young heart.
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