iv.] THE COAL IX THE FIRE. 109 



may consider the coal upon the fire as the middle term 

 of a series, of which the first is live wood, and the last 

 diamond ; and indulge safely in the fancy that every 

 diamond in the world has probably, at some remote 

 epoch, formed part of a growing plant. 



A strange transformation; which will look to us 

 more strange, more truly poetical, the more steadily we 

 consider it. 



The coal on the fire ; the table at which I write 

 what are they made of ? Gas and sunbeams ; with a 

 small percentage of ash, or earthy salts, which need 

 hardly be taken into account. 



Gas and sunbeams. Strange, but true. 



The life of the growing plant and what that life 

 is who can tell ? laid hold of the gases in the air and 

 in the soil ; of the carbonic acid, the atmospheric air, 

 the water for that too is gas. It drank them in through 

 its rootlets : it breathed them in through its leaf -pores, 

 that it might distil them into sap, and bud, and leaf, 

 and wood. But it has to take in another element, 

 without which the distillation and the shaping could 

 never have taken place. It had to drink in the 

 sunbeams that mysterious and complex force which 

 is for ever pouring from the sun, and making itself 

 partly palpable to our senses as heat and light. So the 

 life of the plant seized the sunbeams, and absorbed 

 them, buried them in itself no longer as light and heat, 

 but as invisible chemical force, locked up for ages in 

 that woody fibre. 



So it is. Lord Lytton told us long ago, in a 

 beautiful song, how 



The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose. 



