THE BOY-HUNTER. 85 
The picture of that snowy creature, with its “ pink eyne,” 
and long ears laid back, couched and trembling amidst the 
tow on which it had been placed, in its rough wicker cage, is 
to this hour as distinct as a scene of yesterday. It was the 
sweet surprise of that soft vision that startled my new life 
into full awakening. I have no memory of the dull dawn 
before; it is here my actual being commenced. 
They tell me I had already vegetated a few months, but it 
must have been as a sprawling negation, dim-eyed and dream- 
less, clutching feebly the untenanted air; for now was my 
first amazed recognition of separate being; now was that 
vague Infinite first made palpable to me through sense in 
form. 
Ah! the miracle of that mysterious outer world, where 
such shapes of wondrous beauty grew! I now felt the sun- 
shine, and saw all things glitter. How strange and vivid 
familiar things around me seemed; the rough fence, the old 
trees and house wore golden halos on them; the green earth 
was glorified in splendors that entered to possess me in warm 
thrills; and a creeping joy, mingled of I know not what 
delicious pains, glowed through my life, until it swooned in 
love! Ah, the ecstatic influx of that sensuous birth! would it 
might hold my heart to nature in that sacred glow forever ! 
There is a philosophy which takes man for the highest and 
purest exhibition of the divisible, for that type of being in 
which all organism is perfected; it recognizes him also as 
linking this being with the indivisible, as the penultimate of 
forms—a part of heaven and a part of earth. 
This being accepted, his relations towards inferior creatures 
become beautifully dignified, and constitute a sort of arch- 
archangelship under the sun, drawn by the common ties of 
common sympathy towards all things that breathe and move, 
yet holding an awful throne by right of its spiritual lineage. 
Then doth he become, to their material nature, a “God made 
visible,” —the palpable, immediate expression of that mystery 
