ncomprehensible All; and can say,
This stands marked therein, and no more than this? Alas, not in anywise!
These scientific individuals have been nowhere but where we also are;
have seen some hand breadths deeper than we see into the Deep that is
infinite, without bottom as without shore.

"Laplace's Book on the Stars, wherein he exhibits that certain Planets,
with their Satellites, gyrate round our worthy Sun, at a rate and in
a course, which, by greatest good fortune, he and the like of him have
succeeded in detecting,--is to me as precious as to another. But is this
what thou namest 'Mechanism of the Heavens,' and 'System of the World;'
this, wherein Sirius and the Pleiades, and all Herschel's Fifteen
thousand Suns per minute, being left out, some paltry handful of Moons,
and inert Balls, had been--looked at, nick-named, and marked in the
Zodiacal Way-bill; so that we can now prate of their Whereabout; their
How, their Why, their What, being hid from us, as in the signless Inane?

"System of Nature! To the wisest man, wide as is his vision, Nature
remains of quite _infinite_ depth, of quite infinite expansion; and
all Experience thereof limits itself to some few computed centuries and
measured square-miles. The course of Nature's phases, on this our little
fraction of a Planet, is partially known to us: but who knows what
deeper courses these depend on; what infinitely larger Cycle (of causes)
our little Epicycle revolves on? To the Minnow every cranny and pebble,
and quality and accident, of its little native Creek may have become
familiar: but does the Minnow understand the Ocean Tides and periodic
Currents, the Trade-winds, and Monsoons, and Moon's Eclipses; by all
which the condition of its little Creek is regulated, and may, from time
to time (unmiraculously enough), be quite overset and reversed? Such a
minnow is Man; his Creek this Planet Earth; his Ocean the immeasurable
All; his Monsoons and periodic Currents the mysterious Course of
Providence through AEons of AEons.

"We speak of the Volume of Nature: and truly a Volume it is,--whose
Author and Writer is God. To read it! Dost thou, does man, so much as
well know the Alphabet thereof? With its Words, Sentences, and grand
descriptive Pages, poetical and philosophical, spread out through Solar
Systems, and Thousands of Years, we shall not try thee. It is a Volume
written in celestial hieroglyphs, in the true Sacred-writing; of which
even Prophets are happy