_not_: this is forever very literally a miracle; a thing to strike us
dumb,--for we have no word to speak about it. This Universe, ah me--what
could the wild man know of it; what can we yet know? That it is a Force,
and thousand-fold Complexity of Forces; a Force which is _not_ we. That
is all; it is not we, it is altogether different from us. Force, Force,
everywhere Force; we ourselves a mysterious Force in the centre of that.
"There is not a leaf rotting on the highway but has Force in it; how
else could it rot?" Nay surely, to the Atheistic Thinker, if such a one
were possible, it must be a miracle too, this huge illimitable whirlwind
of Force, which envelops us here; never-resting whirlwind, high as
Immensity, old as Eternity. What is it? God's Creation, the religious
people answer; it is the Almighty God's! Atheistic science babbles
poorly of it, with scientific nomenclatures, experiments and what not,
as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars and
sold over counters: but the natural sense of man, in all times, if he
will honestly apply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing,--ah,
an unspeakable, godlike thing; towards which the best attitude for us,
after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of
soul; worship if not in words, then in silence.

But now I remark farther: What in such a time as ours it requires a
Prophet or Poet to teach us, namely, the stripping-off of those poor
undevout wrappages, nomenclatures and scientific hearsays,--this, the
ancient earnest soul, as yet unencumbered with these things, did for
itself. The world, which is now divine only to the gifted, was then
divine to whosoever would turn his eye upon it. He stood bare before it
face to face. "All was Godlike or God:"--Jean Paul still finds it so;
the giant Jean Paul, who has power to escape out of hearsays: but there
then were no hearsays. Canopus shining down over the desert, with its
blue diamond brightness (that wild blue spirit-like brightness, far
brighter than we ever witness here), would pierce into the heart of the
wild Ishmaelitish man, whom it was guiding through the solitary waste
there. To his wild heart, with all feelings in it, with no _speech_ for
any feeling, it might seem a little eye, that Canopus, glancing out on
him from the great deep Eternity; revealing the inner Splendor to him.
Cannot we understand how these men _worshipped_ Canopus; became what
we call Sabeans,