88 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



of colours and of forms, and in the endless metamorphoses of things 

 around them, whether they looked upon the granite peaks piercing 

 the blue heaven with their hoary pinnacles ; the wild sea with its 

 midnight moans and summer laughter ; the blue heaven with its 

 storms and starlight beauty ; or the green earth with its clustering 

 woods and waving grasses, blossoming all over from pole to pole with 

 a garment of living verdure ;■ — still the same invisible forces were at 

 work, weaving all things in a web of unity, and connecting the most 

 incongruous things together. Hence, in their mystic worship, and 

 in the poetic utterances of their untamed hearts, they pictured nature 

 under the various forms of Buddha, Vishnu, Osiris, Proteus, and 

 Pan ; all of them symbols of the same thought, and representing the 

 creative power which for ever and ever transmits one form into 

 another, and evokes from corruption and death the creatures of a new 

 creation. The story of the Phoenix is the story of the world, and as 

 one form crumbles into ashes, another starts from its dust, to continue 

 the chain of beauty, and push on the series of utilities. 



Where is the dust that has not been alive ? 

 The spade, the plough, disturb our ancestors, 

 From human mould we reap our daily bread ; 

 The globe around earth's hollow surface shakes, 

 And is the ceiling of her sleeping sons : 

 O'er devastation we blind revels keep ; 

 Whole buried towns support the dancer's heel. 



Young. 



Of the sixty simple elements to which all the varieties of dead and 

 living matter are reducible, some fifteen or twenty play the chief parts 

 in the chemistry of the world. All the phenomena which take place 

 around us, whether it be the upheaval of volcanic masses, or the 

 floating of a gossamer in the summer air ; the sweeping hurricane 

 which tears up forests by the roots, or the blushing promise of the 

 spring's first flowers ; the forked lightning, and the tramping thunder 

 which shakes heaven with deep pulsations, or the golden belts upon 

 the body of the bee, and the fairy song he chants among the flowers ; 

 the trickling of molten metals into the fissures of the earth, or the 

 passage of an idea through the brain of man ; are dependent upon the 

 separation and recombination of various of these elementary principles ; 

 without the movements and metamorphoses of which, the whole world 

 would be one scene of darkness and desolation. Chemical laws 



