GENERAL VIEW OF NATURE. 71 



the Canaries or the Azores ; and these illusive images were 

 formed, not by any extraordinary refraction of the rays of 

 light, but by the longing gaze striving to penetrate the dis- 

 tant and the unapproached. The fascination which belongs 

 to such unsubstantial images and illusions was offered abun- 

 dantly by the natural philosophy of the Greeks, the physics 

 of the middle ages, and even by those of the centuries which 

 succeeded them. At the limits of exact knowledge, as from 

 a lofty island shore, the eye loves to glance towards distant 

 regions. The belief of the unusual and the marvellous 

 lends a definite outline to every creation of fancy ; and the 

 realm of imagination, a fairy land of cosmological, geognos- 

 tical, and magnetical dreams, becomes uncontrollably blended 

 with the domain of reality. 



Nature, so manifold in signification sometimes taken 

 as including all the material creation existing and coming 

 into existence, sometimes as a power of internal develop- 

 ment, sometimes is the mysterious prototype of all pheno- 

 mena reveals herself to the simple senses and feelings of 

 man by preference in that which is terrestrial, and closely 

 allied to himself. I\ is in the animated circle of organic 

 forms that we first fed ourselves peculiarly at home. It is 

 where the bosom of the earth unfolds its flowers, and ripens 

 its fruits, and feeds countless tribes of animals, that the 

 image of nature comes i&ost vividly before our souls. The 

 starry vault, the wide expanse of the heavens, belong to the 

 picture of the universe, ia which the magnitude of the 

 masses, and the number o\ congregated suns, or faintly 

 bhining nebulae, excite indeed, our admiration and astonish- 

 ment, but seem estranged from us by the entire absence of 

 any immediate impression of 1;heir being the theatres of 



