146 WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIRDS. 



It is an old fancy of that science of seeing deepest into 

 the millstone, called Metaphysical Philosophy, that the earth 

 is an animal a living thing of course insensate brute and 

 huge, to our apprehension, but to the vision of Higher Intel- 

 ligences an apparelled creature in its robes of cloud and light 

 swung on its orbed circuit, amid travelling peers : that to 

 them its vast calm front must be forever pregnant with a 

 meaning of its own ; and they can, to " the dumbness of its 

 very gesture," interpret ; that it has articulations, "joints 

 and motives " to its body, which must move, act and obey 

 the impulse of the life within it. This active impulse call 

 it the galvanic fluid, or the principle of life lives through 

 and animates its own great bulk, as well as through every 

 modification of its aggregate mass which we see as forms, 

 and know as existences : 



" One sun illumines heaven, one spirit vast 

 With life and love makes chaos ever new." 



That this sphered creature must have been itself in chaos 

 a thought projected out of the mind of God the base and 

 original of the being of which was a self-modifying vital 

 principle. 



This vital force was independent of, and prior to, all or- 

 ganization ; yet the law of its energies was the creative or 

 self-formative so that, if it acted through itself at all, it must 

 act creatively plastically expressing this action in forms, 

 the combinations of its own constituents. 



Mark you ; the gift of this creative energy was from God, 

 who gave it its laws, making it through them self-acting. 



In a word, His higher energy produced here a remote 

 modification of some one thought or phase of His own Eter- 

 nal might ; and this we call and it is to us creative. 



The fact of its being an energy sustained from God, im- 

 plies the necessity of action, and this action constitutes its 

 development of itself its entity. 



