y night, reflecting the heavens
from all her waters, myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her
mountains and windings of her valleys, she would be a spectacle of
rainbow glory, could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her
from her own mountain-tops. Every quality of landscape that has a
name would then be visible in her at once--all that is delicate or
graceful, all that is quiet, or wild, or romantic, or desolate, or
cheerful, or luxuriant, or fresh. That landscape is her face--a
peopled landscape, too, for men's eyes would appear in it like
diamonds among the dew-drops. Green would be the dominant color, but
the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is
shrouded in her veil--a veil the vapory transparent folds of which
the earth, through her ministers the winds, never tires of laying and
folding about herself anew.

Every element has its own living denizens. Can the celestial ocean of
ether, whose waves are light, in which the earth herself floats, not
have hers, higher by as much as their element is higher, swimming
without fins, flying without wings, moving, immense and tranquil, as
by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they
inhabit, rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with one
another, following the slightest pull of one another's attraction, and
harboring, each of them, an inexhaustible inward wealth?

Men have always made fables about angels, dwelling in the light,
needing no earthly food or drink, messengers between ourselves and
God. Here are actually existent beings, dwelling in the light and
moving through the sky, needing neither food nor drink, intermediaries
between God and us, obeying his commands. So, if the heavens really
are the home of angels, the heavenly bodies must be those very angels,
for other creatures _there_ are none. Yes! the earth is our great
common guardian angel, who watches over all our interests combined.

In a striking page Fechner relates one of his moments of direct vision
of this truth.

'On a certain spring morning I went out to walk. The fields were
green, the birds sang, the dew glistened, the smoke was rising, here
and there a man appeared; a light as of transfiguration lay on all
things. It was only a little bit of the earth; it was only one moment
of her existence; and yet as my look embraced her more and more it
seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea, but so true and clear
a fact, that she i