whole life is
to him what it was to Sir Thomas Browne,--one perpetual miracle.
Everything is strange, everything unaccountable, everything beautiful;
from a bug to the moon, from the sight of the eyes to the appetite for
food. He makes it his business to see things as if he saw them for the
first time, and professes astonishment on principle. But he has no
leaning towards mythology; avows his contempt for what he calls
"unregenerate poetry"; and does not mean by nature

"the smooth walks, trimmed edges, butterflies, posies, and
nightingales of the English poets, but the whole orb, with its
geologic history, the Kosmos, carrying fire and snow, that rolls
through the illimitable areas, light as a feather though weighing
billions of tons."

Nor is this exhaustive; for in his character of idealist all
impressions, all thoughts, trees and people, love and faith, astronomy,
history, and religion, enter upon equal terms into his notion of the
universe. He is not against religion; not, indeed, against any religion.
He wishes to drag with a larger net, to make a more comprehensive
synthesis, than any or than all of them put together. In feeling after
the central type of man, he must embrace all eccentricities; his
cosmology must subsume all cosmologies, and the feelings that gave birth
to them; his statement of facts must include all religion and all
irreligion, Christ and Boodha, God and the devil. The world as it is,
and the whole world as it is, physical, and spiritual, and historical,
with its good and bad, with its manifold inconsistencies, is what he
wishes to set forth, in strong, picturesque, and popular lineaments, for
the understanding of the average man. One of his favourite endeavours is
to get the whole matter into a nutshell; to knock the four corners of
the universe, one after another, about his readers' ears; to hurry him,
in breathless phrases, hither and thither, back and forward, in time and
space; to focus all this about his own momentary personality; and then,
drawing the ground from under his feet, as if by some cataclysm of
nature, to plunge him into the unfathomable abyss sown with enormous
suns and systems, and among the inconceivable numbers and magnitudes and
velocities of the heavenly bodies. So that he concludes by striking into
us some sense of that disproportion of things which Shelley has
illuminated by the ironical flash of these eight words: The desire of
the moth for the star.