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presence--not of human life only, but of life in any other form than
that of the green things which grow upon the soil and are voiceless--is
a stain upon the landscape--is at war with the genius of the scene. I
love, indeed, to regard the dark valleys, and the gray rocks, and
the waters that silently smile, and the forests that sigh in uneasy
slumbers, and the proud watchful mountains that look down upon all,--I
love to regard these as themselves but the colossal members of one vast
animate and sentient whole--a whole whose form (that of the sphere)
is the most perfect and most inclusive of all; whose path is among
associate planets; whose meek handmaiden is the moon, whose mediate
sovereign is the sun; whose life is eternity, whose thought is that of
a God; whose enjoyment is knowledge; whose destinies are lost in
immensity, whose cognizance of ourselves is akin with our own cognizance
of the animalculae which infest the brain--a being which we, in
consequence, regard as purely inanimate and material much in the same
manner as these animalculae must thus regard us.
Our telescopes and our mathematical investigations assure us on
every hand--notwithstanding the cant of the more ignorant of the
priesthood--that space, and therefore that bulk, is an important
consideration in the eyes of the Almighty. The cycles in which the stars
move are those best adapted for the evolution, without collision, of
the greatest possible number of bodies. The forms of those bodies are
accurately such as, within a given surface, to include the greatest
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