OF BARON HUMBOLDT. 197 



physical sciences has been in more than one 

 sense of greater benefit to mankind, the fur- 

 therance of culture and civilization, than any 

 other science. Its material benefits are innu- 

 merable. " Science contributes to almost all our 

 wants, satisfying those of the most material 

 and the most intellectual of our nature; and 

 she serves also to lessen some of the greatest 



creation, by which it is typified ; and not only artists and 

 poets, but even the most abstract thinkers, have drawn out 

 of this rich store -house. Lively activity we calibre; time 

 is a stream which rolls violently away ; eternity is a circle ; 

 a mystery is veiled in midniyht ; and truth dwells in the sun. 

 Yes, I begin to believe that even the future fate of the human 

 spirit lies prophesied in the dark oracle of the corporeal 

 creation. Every succeeding spring, which drives the sprouts 

 of plants out of the lap of the earth, enlightens me on the 

 alarming riddle of death ; and refutes my anxious apprehen- 

 sion of an eternal sleep. The swallow which we find torpid 

 in winter, and see revive again in the spring-time, the dead 

 grub, which in the shape of a butterfly rises in the air, young 

 once again, offer us a striking emblem of our immortality. 

 How admirable are all things to me now. There is for me 

 no longer a solitude in all nature. Where I discover a body, 

 there I anticipate a soul where I observe motion I conjec- 

 ture thought ; " where 110 dead man lies buried, there shall 

 be no resurrection :" still omnipotence speaks to me through 

 its works, and thus I understand the doctrine of an 

 omnipresent God." (Philosophic letters by Friedrich von 

 Schiller, written in the year 1785, in the 26th year of his 

 age. See Oxford Quarterly Magazine, March and June, 

 1825, pp. 175-176 and 177.) 



