ace and
boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature,
and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our
Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing
rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods
must round themselves before the rock is formed; then before the rock
is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest
external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora,
Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite!
how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive,
and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the
oyster; farther yet to Plato and the preaching of the immortality of the
soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.

Motion or change and identity or rest are the first and second secrets
of nature:--Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written
on the thumbnail, or the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the
surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky.
Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate
in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of
matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and
yet so poor is nature with all her craft, that from the beginning to the
end of the universe she has but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two
ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will,
star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays
the same properties.

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own
laws. She keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and
equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and at the
same time she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists
to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few
feathers she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is forever
onward, but the artist still goes back for materials and begins again
with the first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise all goes
to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system
in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and
vigor; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are
imperfect men, and seem to bemoan the