d the ear as certainly addressed as the eye.
A "great darkness" first falls upon the prophet, like that which in an
earlier age fell upon Abraham, but without the "horror;" and, as the
Divine Spirit moves on the face of the wildly troubled waters, as a
visible aurora enveloped by the pitchy cloud, the great doctrine is
orally enunciated, that "in the beginning God created the heavens and
the earth." Unreckoned ages, condensed in the vision into a few brief
moments, pass away; the creative voice is again heard, "Let there be
light," and straightway a gray diffused light springs up in the east,
and, casting its sickly gleam over a cloud-limited expanse of steaming,
vaporous sea, journeys through the heavens towards the west. One heavy,
sunless day is made the representative of myriads; the faint light waxes
fainter,--it sinks beneath the dim, undefined horizon; the first scene
of the drama closes upon the seer; and he sits awhile on his hill-top in
darkness, solitary but not sad, in what seems to be a calm and starless
night.

The light again brightens,--it is day; and over an expanse of ocean
without visible bound the horizon has become wider and sharper of
outline than before. There is life in that great sea,--invertebrate,
mayhap also ichthyic, life; but, from the comparative distance of the
point of view occupied by the prophet, only the slow roll of its waves
can be discerned, as they rise and fall in long undulations before a
gentle gale; and what most strongly impresses the eye is the change
which has taken place in the atmospheric scenery. That lower stratum of
the heavens occupied in the previous vision by seething steam, or gray,
smoke-like fog, is clear and transparent; and only in an upper region,
where the previously invisible vapor of the tepid sea has thickened in
the cold, do the clouds appear. But there, in the higher strata of the
atmosphere they lie, thick and manifold,--an upper sea of great waves,
separated from those beneath by the transparent firmament, and, like
them too, impelled in rolling masses by the wind. A mighty advance has
taken place in creation; but its most conspicuous optical sign is the
existence of a transparent atmosphere,--of a firmament, stretched out
over the earth, that separates the waters above from the waters below.
But darkness descends for the third time upon the seer, for the evening
and the morning have completed the second day.

Yet again the light rises under a canopy