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Lessons in Life - A Series of Familiar Essays by Timothy Titcomb
page 114 of 263 (43%)
familiar. It is only a larger mountain than that which lies within
sight of my window. A dozen Monadnocks or Ascutneys or Holyokes,
more or less, make a Mont Blanc, with glaciers and avalanches and
brooding eternity of frost. Such greatness, though it impresses me
much, is not beyond my comprehension. It can be reckoned by cubic
miles. So with the sea: it is only an expanse of water larger than
the river that winds through the meadows. It is great, but it is
only an aggregate of numerable quantities that my eyes can
measure, and my mind comprehend. These are great objects, and they
are great particularly because they are large. They are above me,
and they lead me upward toward creative infinity.

If I turn my eyes in the other direction, however, I lose myself
in infinity quite as readily. If I pick up a pebble at the foot of
Mont Blanc, and undertake the examination of its structure,--the
elements which compose it, the relations of those elements to each
other, the mode of their combination--I am lost as readily as I
should be in following the footsteps of the stars. If I undertake
to look through a drop of water, I may be arrested at first,
indeed, by the sports and struggles of animalcular life; but at
length I find myself gazing beyond it into infinitude--using it as
a lens through which the Godhead becomes visible to me. I can
dissect from one another the muscles and arteries and veins and
nerves and vital viscera of the human body, but the little insect
that taps a vein upon my hand does it with an instrument and by
the operation of machinery which are beyond my scrutiny. They
belong to a life and are the servants of instincts which I do not
understand at all.

These thoughts come to me, borne by certain memories. I know a
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