ishment at the
sight we daily witness with indifference! With the free open sense of
a child, yet with the ripe faculty of a man, his whole heart would be
kindled by that sight, he would discern it well to be Godlike, his
soul would fall down in worship before it. Now, just such a childlike
greatness was in the primitive nations. The first Pagan Thinker
among rude men, the first man that began to think, was precisely this
child-man of Plato's. Simple, open as a child, yet with the depth and
strength of a man. Nature had as yet no name to him; he had not yet
united under a name the infinite variety of sights, sounds, shapes
and motions, which we now collectively name Universe, Nature, or the
like,--and so with a name dismiss it from us. To the wild deep-hearted
man all was yet new, not veiled under names or formulas; it stood naked,
flashing in on him there, beautiful, awful, unspeakable. Nature was to
this man, what to the Thinker and Prophet it forever is, preternatural.
This green flowery rock-built earth, the trees, the mountains, rivers,
many-sounding seas;--that great deep sea of azure that swims overhead;
the winds sweeping through it; the black cloud fashioning itself
together, now pouring out fire, now hail and rain; what _is_ it? Ay,
what? At bottom we do not yet know; we can never know at all. It is
not by our superior insight that we escape the difficulty; it is by our
superior levity, our inattention, our _want_ of insight. It is by _not_
thinking that we cease to wonder at it. Hardened round us, encasing
wholly every notion we form, is a wrappage of traditions, hearsays, mere
_words_. We call that fire of the black thunder-cloud "electricity," and
lecture learnedly about it, and grind the like of it out of glass and
silk: but _what_ is it? What made it? Whence comes it? Whither goes it?
Science has done much for us; but it is a poor science that would hide
from us the great deep sacred infinitude of Nescience, whither we can
never penetrate, on which all science swims as a mere superficial film.
This world, after all our science and sciences, is still a miracle;
wonderful, inscrutable, _magical_ and more, to whosoever will _think_ of
it.

That great mystery of TIME, were there no other; the illimitable,
silent, never-resting thing called Time, rolling, rushing on, swift,
silent, like an all-embracing ocean-tide, on which we and all the
Universe swim like exhalations, like apparitions which are, and then are