g
on now, and which will for ever and for ever, in one form or
another, continue to proceed.

Dreamily listening to the nightingale's song, let us look down upon
the earth as the sun looks down upon it. In this meadow how many
millions of blades of grass are there, each performing wonderful
operations which the cleverest chemist can but poorly indicate,
taking up from the earth its sap, from the air its gases, in a word
living, living as much as ourselves, though in a lower form? On the
oak-tree yonder, how many leaves are doing the same? Just now we
felt the vastness of the earth--its extended majesty, bearing
mountain, forest, and sea. Not a blade of grass but has its insect,
not a leaf; the very air as it softly woos the cheek bears with it
living germs, and upon all those mountains, within those forests,
and in every drop of those oceans, life in some shape moves and
stirs. Nay, the very solid earth itself, the very chalk and clay and
stone and rock has been built up by once living organisms. But at
this instant, looking down upon the earth as the sun does, how can
words depict the glowing wonder, the marvellous beauty of all the
plant, the insect, the animal life, which presses upon the mental
eye? It is impossible. But with these that are more immediately
around us--with the goldfinch, the caterpillar, the nightingale, the
blades of grass, the leaves--with these we may feel, into their life
we may in part enter, and find our own existence thereby enlarged.
Would that it were possible for the heart and mind to enter into
_all_ the life that glows and teems upon the earth--to feel with it,
hope with it, sorrow with it--and thereby to become a grander,
nobler being. Such a being, with such a sympathy and larger
existence, must hold in scorn the feeble, cowardly, selfish desire
for an immortality of pleasure only, whose one great hope is to
escape pain! No. Let me joy with all living creatures; let me suffer
with them all--the reward of feeling a deeper, grander life would be
amply sufficient.

What wonderful patience the creatures called 'lower' exhibit! Watch
this small red ant travelling among the grass-blades. To it they are
as high as the oak-trees to us, and they are entangled and matted
together as a forest overthrown by a tornado. The insect slowly
overcomes all the difficulties of its route--now climbing over the
creeping roots of the buttercups, now struggling under a fallen
leaf, now getting up a bennet