150 WILD SCENES AND SONG-BIKDS. 



All Truth is relative but Existences are positive. It is 

 only to man that the higher truth of these Existences was 

 revealed, for he alone of Earth saw them in their relations. 

 These relations were wide as the extended firmament deep 

 as abysmal space ; and, to him, in right of his angelic birth, 

 the " seeing eye" was gifted. 



This is " the vision and the faculty divine ;" and that his 

 recreant spirituality does not always use it that he has 

 sometimes walked through life as one having eyes that saw 

 not does not, for an instant, alter the relations of things, or 

 make their position on the eternal scale less absolute, or iron- 

 hinged. 



That he has Free Will, in this repect, is his own awful 

 and peculiar gift we cannot conceive, even of Gabriel, 

 u nearest the throne," as one who could not FALL! But we 

 can conceive if man could only see as we do or (more 

 modestly) would only walk with his eyes open, how charm- 

 ingly and pleasantly his relations to the Earth might be 

 changed. 



It is not so absurd, as might appear at first glance, to sup- 

 pose her our Primal Parent through whom we have been 

 born of Spirit for surely we owe to her what we have of 

 flesh and blood. And, to our mind, how lovely such a faith 

 would be ! 



With our hearts possessed of it, then would all the rude 

 tremendous phases of her energy be tempered with ameni- 

 ties. It would then be our large Old Mother, chaunting in 

 her seas a lullaby to us, when the long waves broke roaring 

 on the sands, or shook the fast cliffs with lashings. 



Then it would be the heavy trample of her roused strength 

 in chastenings, when the hoarse storm made noises and the 

 " cross blue lightning" spit its shafts against the crags or, 

 when her mountainous brows shook off the mellow evening, 

 it would he in parting smiles for us when their white fronts 

 laughed out with the fiery kiss of morning, it would be to 

 greet us. 



