Did a spider run over
these dead leaves, I almost fancy I could hear his footfall. The
creaking of the saddle, the soft step of the mare upon the fir-
needles, jar my ears. I seem alone in a dead world. A dead world:
and yet so full of life, if I had eyes to see! Above my head every
fir-needle is breathing--breathing for ever; currents unnumbered
circulate in every bough, quickened by some undiscovered miracle;
around me every fir-stem is distilling strange juices, which no
laboratory of man can make; and where my dull eye sees only death,
the eye of God sees boundless life and motion, health and use.
Slowly I wander on beneath the warm roof of the winter-garden, and
meditate upon that one word--Life; and specially on all that Mr.
Lewes has written so well thereon--for instance -
'We may consider Life itself as an ever-increasing identification
with Nature. The simple cell, from which the plant or animal arises,
must draw light and heat from the sun, nutriment from the surrounding
world, or else it will remain quiescent, not alive, though latent
with life; as the grains in the Egyptian tombs, which after lying
thousands of years in those sepulchres, are placed in the earth, and
smile forth as golden wheat.
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