Insects! They have come out, by their original egg-birth, into an active life. They have crept and eaten—and slept and eaten—creeping, and sleeping, and eating—still waxing in size, and travelling on from fitted pasture to pasture, they have in not many suns reached the utmost of the minute dimensions allotted them—the goal of their slow-footed wanderings, and the term, shall we say—of their life.
SEWARD.
No! But of that first period, through which they have made some display of themselves as living agents. They have reached this term. And look at them—now.
NORTH.
Ay—look at them—now. Wonder on wonder! For now a miraculous instinct guides and compels the creature—who has, as it were, completed one life—who has accomplished one stage of his existence—to entomb himself. And he accordingly builds or spins himself a tomb—or he buries himself in his grave. Shall I say, that she herself, his guardian, his directress, Great Nature, coffins him? Enclosed in a firm shell—hidden from all eyes—torpid—in a death-like sleep—not dead—he waits the appointed hour, which the days and nights bring, and which having come—his renovation, his resuscitation is come. And now the sepulture no longer holds him! Now the prisoner of the tomb has right again to converse with embalmed air and with glittering sunbeams—now, the reptile that was—unrecognisably transformed from himself—a glad, bright, mounting creature, unfurls on either side the translucent or the richly-hued pinions that shall waft him at his liking from blossom to blossom, or lift him in a rapture of aimless joyancy to disport and rock himself on the soft-flowing undulating breeze.
SEWARD.
My dearest sir, the Greek in his darkness, or uncertain twilight of belief, has culled and perpetuated his beautiful emblem. Will the Christian look unmoved upon the singular imaging, which, amidst the manifold strangely-charactered secrets of nature, he finds of his own sealed and sure faith?
NORTH.
No, Seward. The philosophical Theologian claims in this likeness more than an apt simile, pleasing to the stirred fancy. He sees here an Analogy—and this Analogy he proposes as one link in a chain of argumentation, by which he would show that Reason might dare to win from Nature, as a Hope, the truth which it holds from God as revealed knowledge.
SEWARD.