nce, regard as purely inanimate and material much in the same
manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.

Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on
every hand--notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the
priesthood--that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important
consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars
move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of
the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are
accurately such as, within a given surface, to include the greatest
possible amount of matter;--while the surfaces themselves are
so disposed as to accommodate a denser population than could be
accommodated on the same surfaces otherwise arranged. Nor is it any
argument against bulk being an object with God, that space itself is
infinite; for there may be an infinity of matter to fill it. And
since we see clearly that the endowment of matter with vitality is a
principle--indeed, as far as our judgments extend, the leading principle
in the operations of Deity,--it is scarcely logical to imagine it
confined to the regions of the minute, where we daily trace it, and not
extending to those of the august. As we find cycle within cycle without
end,--yet all revolving around one far-distant centre which is the
God-head, may we not analogically suppose in the same manner, life
within life, the less within the greater, and all within the Spirit
Divine? In short, we are madly erring, through self-esteem, in believing
man, in either his temporal or future destinies, to be of more moment
in the universe than that vast "clod of the valley" which he tills and
contemns, and to which he denies a soul for no more profound reason than
that he does not behold it in operation. (*2)

These fancies, and such as these, have always given to my meditations
among the mountains and the forests, by the rivers and the ocean, a
tinge of what the everyday world would not fail to term fantastic. My
wanderings amid such scenes have been many, and far-searching, and often
solitary; and the interest with which I have strayed through many a dim,
deep valley, or gazed into the reflected Heaven of many a bright lake,
has been an interest greatly deepened by the thought that I have strayed
and gazed alone. What flippant Frenchman was it who said in allusion
to the well-known work of Zimmerman, that, "la solitude est une belle
chose; mais il faut que