The solid rock obeys a power which brings its congeries of atoms into a thousand shapes, each one geometrically perfect. Its vegetable covering, in obedience to some external excitation, developes itself in a curious diversity of forms, from the exquisitely graceful to the singularly grotesque, and exhibits properties still more varied and opposed. The animal organism quickened by higher impulses,—powers working within, and modifying the influence of the external forces,—presents, from the Monad to the Mammoth, and through every phase of being up to Man, a yet more wonderful series of combinations, and features still more strangely contrasted.
Lifting our searching gaze into the measureless space beyond our earth, we find planet bound to planet, and system chained to system, all impelled by a universal force to roll in regularity and order around a common centre. The pendulations of the remotest star are communicated through the unseen bond; and our rocking world obeys the mysterious impulse throughout all those forces which regulate the inorganic combinations of this earth, and unto which its organic creation is irresistibly compelled to bow.
The glorious sun by day, and the moon and stars in the silence and the mystery of night, are felt to influence all material nature, holding the great Earth bound in a many-stranded cord which cannot be broken. The tidal flow of the vast ocean, with its variety of animal and vegetable life, the atmosphere, bright with light, obscured by the storm-cloud, spanned by the rainbow, or rent with the explosions of electric fire,—attest to the might of these elementary bonds.
These are but a few of the great phenomena which play their part around this globe of ours, exciting men to wonder, or shaking them with terror.
The mind of man, in its progress towards its higher destiny, is tasked with the physical earth as a problem, which, within the limits of a life, it must struggle to solve. The intellectual spirit is capable of embracing all finite things. Man is gifted with powers for studying the entire circle of visible creation; and he is equal, under proper training, to the task of examining much of the secret machinery which stirs the whole.
In dim outshadowing, earth’s first poets, from the loveliness of external nature, evoked beautiful spiritualizations. To them the shady forests teemed with aërial beings,—the gushing springs rejoiced in fantastic sprites,—the leaping cataracts gleamed with translucent shades,—the cavernous hills were the abodes of genii,—and the earth-girdling ocean was guarded by mysterious forms. Such were the creations of the far-searching mind in its early consciousness of the existence of unseen powers. The philosopher picked out his way through the dark and labyrinthine path, between effects and causes, and slowly approaching towards the light, he gathered semblances of the great Reality, like a mirage, beautiful and truthful, although still but a cloud-reflection of the vast Unseen.
It is thus that the human mind advances from the Ideal to the Real, and that the poet becomes the philosopher, and the philosopher rises into the poet; but at the same time as we progress from fable to fact, much of the soul-sentiment which made the romantic holy, and gave a noble tone to every aspiration, is too frequently merged in a cheerless philosophy which clings to the earth, and reduces the mind to a mechanical condition, delighting in the accumulation of facts, regardless of the great laws by which these are regulated, and the harmony of all Telluric combinations secured. In science we find the elements of the most exalted poetry; and in the mysterious workings of the physical forces we discover connections with the illimitable world of thought,—in which mighty minds delight to try their powers,—as strangely complicated, and as marvellously ordered, as in the psychological phenomena which have, almost exclusively, been the objects of their studies.
In the aspect of visible nature, with its wonderful diversity of form and its charm of colour, we find the Beautiful; and in the operations of these principles, which are ever active in producing and maintaining the existing conditions of matter, we discover the Sublime.
The form and colour of a flower may excite our admiration; but when we come to examine all the phenomena which combine to produce that piece of symmetry and that lovely hue,—to learn the physiological arrangement of its structural parts,—the chemical actions by which its woody fibre and its juices are produced,—and to investigate those laws by which is regulated the power to throw back the white sunbeam from its surface in coloured rays,—our admiration passes to the higher feeling of deep astonishment at the perfection of the processes, and of reverence for their great Designer. There are, indeed, “tongues in trees;” but science alone can interpret their mysterious whispers, and in this consists its poetry.