Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/475

Rh supine; and beneath, yet another chapel, as of death, and the solemn sepulchral crypts. The counterparts of all this and all these, I dare affirm, may veritably be found in this immense and complicate structure, whose foundations are so deep and whose crests are so lofty. Only, as a Gothic cathedral has been termed a petrified forest, we must image this work as a vivified cathedral, thrilling hot swift life through all its "marble nerves":—

"It interpenetrates my granite mass; Through tangled roots and trodden clay doth pass Into the utmost leaves and delicatest flowers; Upon the winds, among the clouds, 'tis spread; It wakes a life in the forgotten dead,— They breathe a spirit up from their obscurest bowers.'

We have all often read the anecdote of Newton, so told as to imply that the discovery of the law of gravitation was owing to the accidental arrest of his attention by the accidental fall of an apple. But apples have fallen by myriads ever since Eve was tempted to eat of one in Eden; yet we do not learn that any of them ever suggested that law until, in the garden at Woolsthorpe, one fell into a mind already teeming with meditations to the very verge of the discovery, and prepared to crystallise round any appropriate fact that should fall among them. Just so a certain square old yellow Book, a hundred and sixty-seven years old, small quarto size, with crumpled vellum covers, part print, part manuscript—print three-fifths, written supplement the rest—must have passed unsuggestive or unproductive through very many hands, and might have passed through millions