604 THE MOUNTAIN 



galvanism* and the rock being the first victims of an 

 erotic trance, and the " Goddess of Love arose from ocean's 

 foam." Mountains are still the shores of the ocean of true 

 life,f the life of body and soul; for the sun must still first 

 kiss their summits, the dawn must bathe them with her first 

 golden beams, and the beatitude of being, the truest and 

 purest raptures of consciousness, there spring in the immor- 

 tal freshness and beauty of Yenus rising from that rosy sea. 



Lo ! for the son of man there is hope in the return to 

 perennial fountains of vitality; he may share the undying 

 youth of Nature by placing himself, an immortal babe, with 

 humility and faith, in contact with his mother's bosom, and 

 thus, by temperance and rectitude, virtue and holiness, com- 

 mune again in love and worship with God and the universe. 



This is the coming day, the morn of health and life for 

 the body ; this is also the coming day of true life for the 

 soul, when, throned on ocean's wave, her " dawn is also 

 blushing o'er the world." 



* "Galvanism is the principle of life. There is no other vital 

 force than the galvanic polarity. The heterogeneity of the three 

 terrestrial elements in a circumscribed individual body is the vital 

 force. The galvanic process is one with the vital process. Elec- 

 trism has a basis ; it is the air. Magnetism has a basis; it is the 

 metal. Chemism has a basis; it is the salt. So has galvanism a 

 basis; it is the organic mass." BIOLOGY, L. 0. 



f Large extents of the earth's surface are still covered by the ma- 

 larial sea for many months of the year. The mountains, in these 

 regions of "bad air," often stretch up through and above the sur- 

 face of this sea, and are the only places of safety for the inhabitants 

 of the valleys at their bases. To a certain degree of N. latitude, the 

 Atlantic Plain and Interior Valley of North America are vast gulfs 

 of this ocean of malaria, and the mountains bounding them, i.e. the 

 Appalachian and Rocky chains, where their summits extend above 

 the plains or surfaces of these poisoned gulfs, are the natural and only 

 places of refuge for the inhabitants of that plain and valley. Thus 

 are mountains not only poetically and philosophically, but literally 

 (littorally) and scientifically, the true shores of the ocean of life. 



