—­I turned a pretty sentence enough in one of my lectures about finding poppies springing up amidst the corn; as if it had been foreseen by nature that wherever there should be hunger that asked for food, there would be pain that needed relief,—­and many years afterwards.  I had the pleasure of finding that Mistress Piozzi had been beforehand with me in suggesting the same moral reflection.

—­I should like to carry some of my friends to see a giant bee-hive I have discovered.  Its hum can be heard half a mile, and the great white swarm counts its tens of thousands.  They pretend to call it a planing-mill, but if it is not a bee-hive it is so like one that if a hundred people have not said so before me, it is very singular that they have not.  If I wrote verses I would try to bring it in, and I suppose people would start up in a dozen places, and say, “Oh, that bee-hive simile is mine,—­and besides, did not Mr. Bayard Taylor call the snowflakes ’white bees’?”

I think the old Master had chosen these trivialities on purpose to amuse the Young Astronomer and myself, if possible, and so make sure of our keeping awake while he went on reading, as follows: 

—­How the sweet souls of all time strike the same note, the same because it is in unison with the divine voice that sings to them!  I read in the Zend Avesta, “No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength speaks so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength speaks good.  No earthly man with a hundred-fold strength does so much evil as Mithra with heavenly strength does good.”

And now leave Persia and Zoroaster, and come down with me to our own New England and one of our old Puritan preachers.  It was in the dreadful days of the Salem Witchcraft delusion that one Jonathan Singletary, being then in the prison at Ipswich, gave his testimony as to certain fearful occurrences,—­a great noise, as of many cats climbing, skipping, and jumping, of throwing about of furniture, and of men walking in the chambers, with crackling and shaking as if the house would fall upon him.

“I was at present,” he says, “something affrighted; yet considering what I had lately heard made out by Mr. Mitchel at Cambridge, that there is more good in God than there is evil in sin, and that although God is the greatest good and sin the greatest evil, yet the first Being of evil cannot weave the scales or overpower the first Being of good:  so considering that the authour of good was of greater power than the authour of evil, God was pleased of his goodness to keep me from being out of measure frighted.”