There have been human hearts, constituted just like ours, for six thousand years. The same stars rise and set upon this globe that rose upon the plains of Shinar or along the Egyptian Nile; and the same sorrows rise and set in every age. All that sickness can do, all that disappointment can effect, all that blighted love, disappointed ambition, thwarted hope, ever did, they do still. Not a tear is wrung over and over again in long succession since the hour that the fated pair stepped from paradise, and gave things; but the heart forevermore practices old experiences. Therefore our life is but a new form of the way men have lived from the beginning. -H. W. Beecher
