gins to assume any orderly and lovely state. You
will find it impossible to separate this idea of gradated manifestation
from that of the vital power. Things are not either wholly alive, or
wholly dead. They are less or more alive. Take the nearest, most easily
examined instance--the life of a flower. Notice what a different degree
and kind of life there is in the calyx and the corolla. The calyx is
nothing but the swaddling clothes of the flower; the child-blossom is
bound up in it, hand and foot; guarded in it, restrained by it, till the
time of birth. The shell is hardly more subordinate to the germ in the
egg, than the calyx to the blossom. It bursts at last; but it never
lives as the corolla does. It may fall at the moment its task is
fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or
persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the rose;
or harmonise itself so as to share in the aspect of the real flower, as
in the lily; but it never shares in the corolla's bright passion of
life. And the gradations which thus exist between the different members
of organic creatures, exist no less between the different ranges of
organism. We know no higher or more energetic life than our own; but
there seems to me this great good in the idea of gradation of life--it
admits the idea of a life above us, in other creatures, as much nobler
than ours, as ours is nobler than that of the dust.

MARY. I am glad you have said that; for I know Violet and Lucilla and
May want to ask you something; indeed, we all do; only you frightened
Violet so about the ant-hill, that she can't say a word; and May is
afraid of your teasing her, too: but I know they are wondering why you
are always telling them about heathen gods and goddesses, as if you half
believed in them; and you represent them as good; and then we see there
is really a kind of truth in the stories about them; and we are all
puzzled: and, in this, we cannot even make our difficulty quite clear to
ourselves;--it would be such a long confused question, if we could ask
you all we should like to know.

L. Nor is it any wonder, Mary; for this is indeed the longest, and the
most wildly confused question that reason can deal with; but I will try
to give you, quickly, a few clear ideas about the heathen gods, which
you may follow out afterwards, as your knowledge increases.

Every heathen conception of deity in which you are likely to be
interested, has