Before the fair flowers were seen, or ever_ the moveable powers
    were established; before the innumerable multitude of angels were
    gathered together,

    Or ever the heights of the air were lifted up, before the measures
    of the firmament were named, or ever the chimneys of Zion were hot._

    Then did I consider these things, and they all were made through Me
    alone, and through none other:  by Me also they shall be ended, and
    by none other."

It is all very beautiful:  but (for aught that appears) no one was denying it.  It has been shrewdly objected against the arguments of the “affable Archangel” in the later books of Paradise Lost that argument by its nature admits of being answered:  and the fatal fallacy of putting human speech into a divine mouth, as in the above passage, is that it invites retort.

A sensible man does not aspire to bind the sweet influences of Pleiades:  but he may, and does, aspire to understand something of the universal harmony in which he and they bear a part, if only that he may render it a more perfect obedience.  “Let me know,” he craves, “that I may accept my fate intelligently, even though it prove that under the iron rule of Necessity I have no more freedom of will than the dead,

  Roll’d round in earth’s diurnal course
    With rocks, and stones, and trees.”

The claim (as Man must think) is a just one—­for why was he given intelligence if not to use it?  And even though disallowed as presumptuous, it is an instinctive one.  Man is, after all, a part of the Universe, and just as surely as the Pleiades or Arcturus:  and moreover he feels in himself a harmony correspondent with the greater harmony of his quest.  His heart beats to a rhythm:  his blood pulses through steady circuits; like the plants by which he is fed, he comes to birth, grows, begets his kind, dies, and returns to earth; like the tides, his days of gestation obey the moon and can be reckoned by her; in the sweat of his body he tills the ground, and by the seasons, summer and winter, seedtime and harvest, his life while it lasts is regulated.  But above all he is the microcosm, the tiny percipient centre upon which the immense cosmic circle focusses itself as the sun upon a burning-glass—­and he is not shrivelled up by the miracle!  Other creatures (he notes) share his sensations; but, so far as he can discover, not his intelligence—­or, if at all, in no degree worth measuring.  So far as he can detect, he is not only an actor in the grand cosmic pageant, but the sole intelligent spectator.  As a poor Welsh parson, Thomas Traherne, wrote of the small town of his childhood:—­

The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the people were mine, their clothes and gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, their skins and ruddy faces.  The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars; and all the world was mine, and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it....