s the uncouth python floundering in the saurian slime of a
half-cooled planet.

When a polar continent heaves from the bosom of the deep, or when the
inquiring eye rests upon the serrated rock, the antique victim of some
drift-dispersing glacier, the mind perceives the effects and recognizes
the existence of nature's omnipotent muscles, and their appalling power.

But that adventurer who chases the chain of necessity to the sources of
this grand instability, is merged at once in a haze of speculations,
beautiful as sunlight through morning mists, but uncertain as the
veriest chimeras. While beyond the idea of comprehensive motion the
colossal symmetry of Truth expands in ultimate outlines, her features
are shrouded, but in such an attractive clare-obscure of inviting
analogies and semi-satisfying glimpses, that the temptation to guess at
the ideal face almost overpowers the desire to kiss the real and shining
feet below. Unfortunately, there is the domain of the myths and
immaterials, _there_ is the home of the law and the force, _there_ dwell
the Odyles, the electricities, the magnetisms, and affinities, and there
the speculative AEneas pursues shadows more fleeting than the Stygian
ghosts, and the grasp of the metaphysician closes on shapes whose
embrace is vacancy. The bark that ploughs within this mystic expanse,
sheds from its cleaving keel but coruscations of phosphorescent
sparkles, which glimmer and quench in a gloom that Egyptian seers never
penetrated, and modern guessers cannot conjecture through. There is,
indeed, 'oak and triple brass' upon his breast who steeps his lips in
the chalice of the Rosicrucian, and the doom of Prometheus is the fabled
defeat which is waiting for the wanderer in those opaque spaces. While
we warily, therefore, tread not upon the ground whose trespass brought
the vulture of unfilled desire, the craving void for visionary lore upon
the heaven-born, earth-punished speculator, we can still find flowery
paths and full fruition, in meadows wherein the light of reason requires
no support from the _ignes fatui_ of imagination; meadows after all so
broad, that did not metaphysics 'teach man his tether,' they would seem
illimitable. The book of nature is not spread before us, turning leaf
after leaf at every sunrise, with new delineations on every page, to be
stared at with vacant inanity, or criticized with imbecile verbosity.
The rivulet does not tinkle and the sky does not look blue that