and striking images, which throw a dazzling light upon the obscurest
question or the most difficult problem. How in such matters can one
dispense with figurative speech, when one is reduced, as a rule, to an
inability to show the things themselves, but only their images and their
symbols?

Follow him, for example, in the "The Sky" (5/2.), which seems to thrill
with the ardent and comprehensive genius of a Humboldt, and admire the ease
with which he surmounts all the difficulties and smooths the way for the
vast voyage on which he conducts you, past the infinity of the suns and the
stars in their millions, scintillating in the cold air of night, to descend
once more to our humble "Earth" (5/3.); first an ocean of fire, rolling its
heavy waves of molten porphyry and granite, then "slowly hardening into
strange floes and bergs, hotter than the red iron in the fire of the
forge," rounding its back, all covered with gaping pustules, eruptive
mountains and craters, and the first folds of its calcined crust, until the
day when the vast mist of densest vapours, heaped up on every hand and of
immeasurable depth, begins gradually to show rifts, giving rise at last to
an infinite storm, a stupendous deluge, and forming the strange universal
sea, "a mineral sludge, veiled by a chaos of smoke," whence at length the
primitive soil emerges, "and at last the green grass."

And although "a little animal proteid, capable of pleasure and pain,
surpasses in interest the whole immense creation of dead matter," he does
not forget to show us the spectacle of life flowing through matter itself;
and he animates even the simple elementary bodies, celebrating the
marvellous activities of the air, the violence of Chlorine, the
metamorphoses of Carbon, the miraculous bridals of Phosphorus, and "the
splendours which accompany the birth of a drop of water." (5/4.)