We love our own face in a mirror, and, like a second Narcissus, we grow amorous over it, shadowed in the burnished lapsing of a fountain-we love the stars sleeping in deep waters, too, (happy association!) and the pageantry of cloud, and rock, and tree, reversed in a still, liquid sky-in a word, we love all similitudes!

Perhaps this is because they illustrate to us a power of reproduction external to ourselves, and this is such an approach to that creative faculty which belongs to the "big imagination" in us, that, having no jealousy in our temper, we are charmed to see, even in "dumb nature," something like a rivalry of this "bright particular"-gift-we own.

In truth, there is something worth following up in this idea. We should like to see the painter or the poet who could ever produce a landscape so cunningly, even to the last minute tracery of its lines and shades, as we have seen. the unruffled surface of a lake do it some clear, calm morn

ing before sunrise. Not one twisted fibre of the grass, one knotted eccentric twig, one blue-eyed, dewy-lipped violet but hung there upside down, to be sure-but perfect as it came from God's hand.

"What is this? Does it not mock our pride of art, and shame its dedicated altars?"

"It is God's handiwork through his natural laws!"

"Ah! But the picture is not always there. Does God (in reverence) with his own personal hand paint the landscape in the lake whenever it is seen? Is it a special act?" "No; it is consequential upon an arrangement of laws fixed since the birth of time."

"You are smiling! was that smile now upon your face pre-ordained since the same period?"

"So far as we know, it was, equally with the other, consequential."

"That smile was a physical expression of a mental condition or humor in yourself, was it not?"

"Ay."

"It might have been a frown, or varied by other external modification?"

"Ay."

"Might not the landscape in the lake have been a stormshaken blurr ?"

"Granted."

"Is it not quite as 'consequential,' then, that earth has her physical expressions of certain conditions and humors of the vital force in her which are affected by external relations?"

"What external relations can you mean?"

First, those to her solar system; next, those to the other systems which make up the universe. These relations may determine in her all the action of elemental expression-variations of the seasons, &c., &c."

"Pshaw! fogmatic !"

Guilty; but still, we 'love similitudes.'

It is an old fancy of that science of seeing deepest into the millstone, called Metaphysical Philosophy, that the earth is an animal-a living thing-of course insensate brute and huge, to our apprehension, but to the vision of Higher Intelligences an apparelled creature in its robes of cloud and light -swung on its orbed circuit, amid travelling peers: that to them its vast calm front must be forever pregnant with a meaning of its own; and they can, to "the dumbness of its very gesture," interpret; that it has articulations, "joints and motives" to its body, which must move, act and obey the impulse of the life within it. This active impulse-call it the galvanic fluid, or the principle of life-lives through and animates its own great bulk, as well as through every modification of its aggregate mass which we see as forms, and know as existences:

"One sun illumines heaven, one spirit vast
With life and love makes chaos ever new."

That this sphered creature must have been itself in chaos a thought projected out of the mind of God-the base and original of the being of which was a self-modifying vital principle.

This vital force was independent of, and prior to, all organization; yet the law of its energies was the creative or self-formative so that, if it acted through itself at all, it must act creatively-plastically-expressing this action in forms, the combinations of its own constituents.

Mark you; the gift of this creative energy was from God, who gave it its laws, making it through them self-acting. In a word, His higher energy produced here a remote modification of some one thought or phase of His own Eternal might; and this we call-and it is to us-creative.

The fact of its being an energy sustained from God, implies the necessity of action, and this action constitutes its development of itself—its entity.

That this entity must be infinitely remote from the positive being of God is self-evident.

"As if the cause of 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 pro-create-creation is absolute 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 must 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 sensuous life of action-which we have shown to be a necessity 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 comparatively 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 principle 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 vitality, be to it the soul-

"The lightning of its being,"

yet a lightning the fountain of which may be the sun, while the eternity of God's own life may be the source of that higher soul in man.

His soul is creative, and peoples the chambers of its imagery with rare and gorgeous creatures. Then why may it not be as we have shown it must, from the necessities of its origin and existence-that this lower or Earth Soul is likewise creative, and all things that it contains, the expression of this self-exercised, self-modifying power, in thoughts that walk, run, creep, are still, or fly?

A union of the two energies, the Spiritual and Sensuous, seems to have been necessary to the consummation of things as they are.

The purely Spiritual could know nothing of the Sensuous, except as an abstract idea; nor could the purely Sensuous know the Spiritual at all, except through vague and undefined images of power; and this very necessity for the interposition of an image precludes the possibility of any knowledge of its essence.

Hence it appears to us, that the life of the Sensuous must have been confined to simple consciousness-a mere direct knowledge of external things, as they appealed to its senses, effected its organization; while its being, to the Spiritual, was only a cold and lifeless reflex, such as we have described the inverted landscape in the lake to have been.

Now we fancy that, to angelic vision, which alone, under God, regarded things from the Universe as a point of view, our world must have hung upon space about as unnaturally as that morning picture did, and all its action have seemed as the shadow of a Bird passing over it would have done to us from our point of view.

-The Dædal earth,

That island in the ocean of the world,
Hung in its cloud of all sustaining air;
But this divinest universe

Was yet a chaos and a curse,