The Atlantic Monthly

y changing the peg in the scale of creation, and the studies of the boy might have begun where now they end. Twenty-five years in the span of life would thus have been saved, had what must be a universal acquirement been incorporated into the original programme of human nature.

Or had the Deity appreciated literature as we do, He would probably have written out the universe in some snug little volume, some miniature series, or some boundless Bodleian, instead of unfolding it through infinite space and time, as an actual, concrete, unwritten reality. Be creation a single act or an eternal process, it would have been all a thing of books. The Divine Mind would have revealed itself in a library, instead of in the universe. As for men, they would have existed only in treatises on the mammalia. There are some specimens which we hardly think are according to any anticipation of heavenly reason, and therefore they would not have existed at all. Nothing would have been but God and literature. Possibly a respon