ey meet again, so long apart ...but that way fury lies. Yet one
cannot help but think: I lie awake and think, for she fills my soul, and
absorbs it, with all her moods and ways. She has meanings, secrets,
plans. Strange, strange, for instance, that similarity between the
scheme of Europe and the scheme of Asia: each with three southern
peninsulas pointing south: Spain corresponding with Arabia, Italy with
India, the Morea and Greece, divided by the Gulf of Corinth,
corresponding with the Malay Peninsula and Annam, divided by the Gulf of
Siam; each with two northern peninsulas pointing south, Sweden and
Norway, and Korea and Kamschatka; each with two great islands similarly
placed, Britain and Ireland, and the Japanese Hondo and Yezo; the Old
World and the New has each a peninsula pointing north--Denmark and
Yucatan: a forefinger with long nail--and a thumb--pointing to the Pole.
What does she mean? What can she mean, O Ye that made her? Is she
herself a living being, with a will and a fate, as sailors said that
ships were living entities? And that thing that wheeled at the Pole,
wheels it still yonder, yonder, in its dark ecstasy? Strange that
volcanoes are all near the sea: I don't know why; I don't think that
anyone ever knew. This fact, in connection with submarine explosions,
used to be cited in support of the chemical theory of volcanoes, which
supposed the infiltration of the sea into ravines containing the
materials which form the fuel of eruptions: but God knows if that is
true. The lofty ones are intermittent--a century, two, ten, of silent
waiting, and then their talk silenced for ever some poor district; the
low ones are constant in action. Who could know the dark way of the
world? Sometimes they form a linear system, consisting of several vents
which extend in one direction, near together, like chimneys of some long
foundry beneath. In mountains, a series of serrated peaks denotes the
presence of dolomites; rounded heads mean calcareous rocks; and needles,
crystalline schists. The preponderance of land in the northern
hemisphere denotes the greater intensity there of the causes of
elevation at a remote geologic epoch: that is all that one can say about
it: but whence that greater intensity? I have some knowledge of the
earth for only ten miles down: but she has eight thousand miles: and
whether through all that depth she is flame or fluid, hard or soft, I do
not know, I do not know. Her method of forming coal,