You call it miraculous,—­I replied,—­tossing the expression with my facial eminence, a little smartly, I fear.—­Two men are walking by the polyphloesboean ocean, one of them having a small tin cup with which he can scoop up a gill of sea-water when he will, and the other nothing but his hands, which will hardly hold water at all, —­and you call the tin cup a miraculous possession!  It is the ocean that is the miracle, my infant apostle!  Nothing is clearer than that all things are in all things, and that just according to the intensity and extension of our mental being we shall see the many in the one and the one in the many.  Did Sir Isaac think what he was saying when he made his speech about the ocean,—­the child and the pebbles, you know?  Did he mean to speak slightingly of a pebble?  Of a spherical solid which stood sentinel over its compartment of space before the stone that became the pyramids had grown solid, and has watched it until now!  A body which knows all the currents of force that traverse the globe; which holds by invisible threads to the ring of Saturn and the belt of Orion!  A body from the contemplation of which an archangel could infer the entire inorganic universe as the simplest of corollaries!  A throne of the all-pervading Deity, who has guided its every atom since the rosary of heaven was strung with beaded stars!

So,—­to return to our walk by the ocean,—­if all that poetry has dreamed, all that insanity has raved, all that maddening narcotics have driven through the brains of men, or smothered passion nursed in the fancies of women,—­if the dreams of colleges and convents and boarding-schools,—­if every human feeling that sighs, or smiles, or curses, or shrieks, or groans, should bring all their innumerable images, such as come with every hurried heart-beat, —­the epic which held them all, though its letters filled the zodiac, would be but a cupful from the infinite ocean of similitudes and analogies that rolls through the universe.

[The divinity-student honored himself by the way in which he received this.  He did not swallow it at once, neither did he reject it; but he took it as a pickerel takes the bait, and carried it off with him to his hole (in the fourth story) to deal with at his leisure.]

—­Here is another remark made for his especial benefit.—­There is a natural tendency in many persons to run their adjectives together in TRIADS, as I have heard them called,—­thus:  He was honorable, courteous, and brave; she was graceful, pleasing, and virtuous.  Dr. Johnson is famous for this; I think it was Bulwer who said you could separate a paper in the “Rambler” into three distinct essays.  Many of our writers show the same tendency,—­my friend, the Professor, especially.  Some think it is in humble imitation of Johnson,—­some that it is for the sake of the stately sound only.  I don’t think they get to the bottom of it.  It is, I suspect, an instinctive and involuntary effort of the mind