BIRDS AND POETS. 
147 
That this entity must be infinitely remote from the posi- 
tive being of God is self-evident. 
" As if the cause o-f life could think and live." 
God's being must be something immeasurably beyond the 
ideas of thinking and living, as they appear to us — for how 
could like create its like ? It may ^ro-create — creation is ab- 
solute and beyond this ; the power of pro-creation is from 
it an endowment : so that in applying the term creativeness 
to any being under God, we mast be understood as using it 
in the sense of production or projection out of the laws of 
its own life. 
We are no 
" Magian with his powerful wand," 
setting up to reveal, or be doctrinal of that which may not 
be known ; but yet, we protest " we love similitudes," and 
are fain to test how far they may playfully and safely carry 
us ; for we mean to demonstrate (save the mark !) that these 
Birds of which we are to treat are no less than the winged 
words " of this Earth's Poetry ! 
Do they not express the supremest graces of a purely sen- 
suous life — of action — which we have shown to be a neces- 
sity of that vital energy permeating the globe and all that is 
therein ? 
Now let us see how we can make our Earth a Poet — to 
discourse in sweet living numbers ! This must be compara- 
tively with Man, of course. There are, as we have before 
said, two souls ; Man possesses a soul — a peculiar energy, 
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life "• — Eternal life, 
higher than the life of the Earth, and to which its vital prin- 
ciple has been given as a medium. 
Then, as the soul is man's highest vitality, why may not 
the Principle of Life, which is to the Earth its highest vi- 
tality, be to it the soul — 
The lightning of its being," 
