CHAPTER XXVIII. For us the winds do blow, The earth doth rest, heaven move, and fountains flow. As our delight, or as our treasure: Or cabinet of pleasure. The stars have us to bed; Night draws the curtain, which the sun withdraws; Music and light attend our head. GEORGE HERBERT. MARHAM. WHAT are you thinking of, Oliver ? Your cheeks are so glowing, and your eyes so bright, that I am afraid you are too much excited with your thoughts. AUBIN. I am trying to recollect something of Coleridge's, but I cannot. But I know the passage begins with saying, that every rank of creatures, as it ascends in the scale of creation, leaves death behind it or under it, and is itself a mute prophecy of the rank next above it. Sometimes water freezes into a resemblance of ferns and leaves, and earth crystallizes into spurs, like plants and trees. And then, among trees and flowers, there is what foretokens the animal world in the sensitive plant, and in the contractile power of such river-plants as lengthen or shorten the stalk with the rise and fall of the water, and in the circumstance of there being male and female trees. I think it was Goethe who said that the skeletons of many marine creatures clearly show, that, while making them, nature was plainly intending a higher race of land-animals. And then, among these creatures of the earth, there were things to foreshow what the better nature of man was to be ; for the trunk of the elephant is a rude hand; and the migratory instinct of the swallow is like strong reason; and the faithfulness of the dove is not unlike the affection of man and wife; and what the beavers make to lodge in is an attempt at a home. MARHAM. Very ingenious. Does Coleridge say that? AUBIN. No, uncle. But now I do remember a part of what I wanted; and it is the best thing he ever wrote, and what ought to be laid up in cedar, as his nephew thinks. "Let us carry ourselves back in spirit to the mysterious week, the teeming work-days of the Creator, as they rose in vision before the eye of the inspired historian of the generation of the heavens and earth, in the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens. And who that had watched their ways with an understanding heart could, as the vision evolving still advanced towards him, contemplate the filial and loyal bee; the home-building, wedded, and divorceless swallow; and above all, the manifoldly intelligent ant-tribes, with their commonwealth and confederacies, their warriors and miners, the husbandfolk, and the virgin sisters, with the holy instincts of maternal love detached and in selfless purity, and not say to himself, Behold the shadow of approaching humanity, the sun rising from behind in the kindling morn of creation." Now that is very beautiful, is not it? It makes me feel as the angels may have done when they saw the young world rounding into beauty, and growing green and peopled, as they looked at it from time to time. It is as though I had been one of the witnesses of the creation; and I am kindred to those sons of God who did see it, as I know by my being able to feel this way. MARHAM. Know it so, Oliver! how? Though it is pleasant to think on the stages in creation, improving one on another, till the last, but little lower than that of the angels. AUBIN. How the world was once without form and void; then how it was shaped by the rush of water round it, and the bursting of fire from within it; then how its bleak surface grew green with vegetation; then how there sprung up vast trees, and then, in the forests, how vast creatures began to move, and when their creeping race had died out, how a better and still a better kind of animals appeared, till at last man was made in the image of the Highest, — of God MARHAM. With the earth given him to subdue, and every thing in it to use. And so it was for us the earth was made, though at first it was only the pasture of cattle and the hunting-field of the lion. There was progress in the creation from day to day, or rather in one order of creatures over the next order. And so we were the last, because we were to be the highest. AUBIN. According to an ascending scale of worth in the creation. It is this delights the soul. First there was made the kingdom of dead minerals, then that of growing plants, then that of active creatures, then that of reasoning activity; and now there are among us the beginnings of a new creation in Christ Jesus. It is because of her sympathy with it, because of her own progressive character, that my soul thrills to this. And just now I felt as though I saw age beyond age, and height above height, and glory beyond glory, for my soul to pass into. MARHAM. I believe in the soul's infinite progress, though I do not think it is to be expected from the manner in which the world grew out of a void into what it now is. Because, if any thing at all is to be inferred from that, it would be, I think, the possibility, some time, of some creatures being made superior to ourselves. AUBIN. For O, no! but the certainty of social progress, and therefore of individual improvement, and that for ever, probably. It would be as you say, if man differed from the brutes only as they do from trees, and as trees do from marble and iron. there is nothing in a mineral, which, at its best, could ever become a plant, and vegetable organization perfected to the utmost would never make an animal, and the instincts of all animals in one would not amount to reason. But reason itself is not to be spoken of so, for there is no high place to which it is not competent; and while above us men there are angels and archangels, the difference between them and us is not in nature, but in degree, in what is possible to be outgrown. Yes! there was progress in the geological ages, and it was from one to a higher kind of existence; and now that progressiveness is in the soul of man, and may be in it infinitely; for, by the very nature of the spirit, there is no prin |