would never be this rapture in nature.  If the king is in the palace nobody looks at the walls.  It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and architecture.  The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider that our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society.  Man is fallen; nature is erect, and serves as a differential thermometer, detecting the presence or absence of the divine sentiment in man.  By fault of our dulness and selfishness, we are looking up to nature, but when we are convalescent, nature will look up to us.  We see the foaming brook with compunction; if our own life flowed with the right energy, we should shame the brook.  The stream of zeal sparkles with real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and moon.  Nature may be as selfishly studied as trade.  Astronomy to the selfish becomes astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with intent to show where our spoons are gone); and anatomy and physiology become phrenology and palmistry.

6.  But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, but not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes, (as the ancient represented nature by Proteus,[500] a shepherd), and in undescribable variety.  It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap.  A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates.  All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time.  Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic[501] and Ptolemaic schemes[502] for her large style.  We know nothing rightly, for want of perspective.  Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora,[503] Fauna,[504] Ceres,[505] and Pomona,[506] to come in.  How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man!  All duly arrive,[507] and then race after race of men.  It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato,[508] and the preaching of the immortality of the soul.  Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.