to expect patronage of any greater or more powerful.  Let us suck the sweetness of those affections and consuetudes[688] that grow near us.  These old shoes are easy to the feet.  Undoubtedly we can easily pick faults in our company, can easily whisper names prouder and that tickle the fancy more.  Every man’s imagination hath its friends; and pleasant would life be with such companions.  But if you cannot have them on good mutual terms, you cannot have them.  If not the Deity but our ambition hews and shapes the new relations, their virtue escapes, as strawberries lose their flavor in garden beds.

Thus truth, frankness, courage, love, humility, and all the virtues range themselves on the side of prudence, or the art of securing a present well-being.  I do not know if all matter will be found to be made of one element, as oxygen or hydrogen, at last, but the world of manners and actions is wrought of one stuff, and begin where we will[689] we are pretty sure in a short space to be mumbling our ten commandments.

CIRCLES.[690]

The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary picture is repeated without end.  It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world.  St. Augustine[691] described the nature of God as a circle whose centre was everywhere and its circumference nowhere.  We are all our lifetime reading the copious sense of this first of forms.  One moral we have already deduced in considering the circular or compensatory character of every human action.  Another analogy we shall now trace, that every action admits of being outdone.  Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon,[692] and under every deep a lower deep opens.

This fact, as far as it symbolizes the moral fact of the Unattainable, the flying Perfect, around which the hands of man can never meet, at once the inspirer and the condemner of every success, may conveniently serve us to connect many illustrations of human power in every department.

There are no fixtures in nature.  The universe is fluid and volatile.  Permanence is but a word of degrees.  Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts.  The law dissolves the fact and holds its fluid.  Our culture is the predominance of an idea which draws after it all this train of cities and institutions.  Let us rise into another idea; they will disappear.  The Greek sculpture[693] is all melted away, as if it had been statues of ice:  here and there a solitary figure or fragment remaining, as we see flecks and scraps of snow left in cold dells and mountain clefts in June and July.  For the genius that created it creates now somewhat else.  The Greek letters[694] last a little longer, but are already passing under