ar, and the ball is a heap of
powder which your breath scatters in the air. If the cohesive
energy in Nature should get tired and unclench its grasp of matter,
our earth would instantly become "a great slump"; so that which we
tread on is not material substance, but matter braced up by a
spiritual substance, for which it serves as the form and show.

All the peculiarities of rock and glass, diamond, ice and crystal
are due to the working of unseen military forces that employ
themselves under ground--in caverns, beneath rivers, in mountain
crypts, and through the coldest nights, drilling companies of
atoms into crystalline battalions and squares, and every caprice of
a fantastic order.

When we turn to the vegetable kingdom, is not the revelation still
more wonderful? The forms which we see grow out of substances and
are supported by forces which we do not see. The stuff out of which
all vegetable appearances are made is reducible to oxygen,
hydrogen, carbon and nitrogen. How does it happen that this common
stock is worked up in such different ways? Why is a lily woven out
of it in one place and a dahlia in another, a grapevine here, and a
honeysuckle there--the orange in Italy, the palm in Egypt, the
olive in Greece and the pine in Maine? Simply because a subtile
force of a peculiar kind is at work wherever any vegetable
structure adorns the ground, and takes to itself its favorite robe.
We have outgrown the charming fancy of the Greeks that every tree
has its Dryad that lives in it, animates it, and dies when the tree
withers. But we ought, for the truth's sake, to believe that a
life-spirit inhabits every flower and shrub, and protects it
against the prowling forces of destruction. Look at a full-sized
oak, the rooted Leviathan of the fields. Judging by your senses and
by the scales, you would say that the substance of the noble tree
was its bulk of bark and bough and branch and leaves and sap, the
cords of woody and moist matter that compose it and make it heavy.
But really its substance is that which makes it an oak, that which
weaves its bark and glues it to the stem, and wraps its rings of
fresh wood around the trunk every year, and pushes out its boughs
and clothes its twigs with breathing leaves and sucks up nutriment
from the soil co