th the dream, "the interpretation thereof." One class of
interpreters may well remind us of the dim-eyed old man,--the genius of
unbelief so poetically described by Coleridge,--who, sitting in his cold
and dreary cave, "talked much and vehemently concerning an infinite
series of causes and effects, which he explained to be a string of blind
men, the last of whom caught hold of the skirt of the one before him, he
of the next, and so on, till they were all out of sight, and that they
all walked infallibly straight, without making one false step, though
all were alike blind." With these must I class those assertors of the
development hypothesis who can see in the upward progress of being only
the operations of an incomprehending and incomprehensible law, through
which, in the course of unreckoned ages, the lower tribes and families
have risen into the higher, and inferior into superior natures, and in
virtue of which, in short, the animal creation has grown, in at least
its nobler specimens, altogether unwittingly, without thought or care on
its own part, and without intelligence on the part of the operating law,
from irrational to rational, and risen in the scale from the mere
promptings of instinct to the highest exercise of reason,--from apes and
baboons to Bacons and Newtons. The blind lead the blind;--the unseeing
law operates on the unperceiving creatures; and they go, not together
into the ditch, but direct onwards, straight as an arrow, and higher
and higher at every step.

Another class look with profound melancholy on that great city of the
dead,--the burial-place of all that ever lived in the past,--which
occupies with its ever-extending pavements of gravestones, and its
ever-lengthening streets of tombs and sepulchres, every region opened up
by the geologist. They see the onward procession of being as if but
tipped with life, and nought but inanimate carcasses all behind,--dead
individuals, dead species, dead genera, dead creations,--a universe of
death; and ask whether the same annihilation which overtook in turn all
the races of all the past, shall not one day overtake our own race also,
and a time come when men and their works shall have no existence save as
stone-pervaded fossils locked up in the rock forever? Nowhere do we find
the doubts and fears of this class more admirably portrayed than in the
works of perhaps the most thoughtful and suggestive of living poets:--

"Are God and Nature then at strife,