links what seems not living to what certainly lives and feels and has
power over all movement of its own. The circuits of the planets stretch
and then recede. Their ellipses elongate and flatten again to the
semblance of circles. The Poles slowly nod once every many thousand
years, there is a libration to the moon; and in all this vast harmonious
process of come and go the units of it twirl and spin, and, as they
spin, run more gravely in ordered procession round their central star:
that star moves also to a beat, and all the stars of heaven move each in
times of its own as well, and their movement is one thing altogether.
Whoever should receive the mighty business moving in one ear would get
the music of it in a perfect series of chords, superimposed the one upon
the other, but not a tremble of them out of tune.

The great scheme is not infinite, for were it infinite such rhythms
could not be. It was made, and it moves in order to the scheme of its
making without caprice, not wayward anywhere, but in and out and back
and forth as to a figure set for it. It must be so, or these exact
arrangements could not be.

Now with this regulated breathing and expiration, playing itself out in
a million ways and co-extensive with the universe of things, the tides
keep time, and they alone of earthly things bring its actual force to
our physical perception, to our daily life. We see the sea in movement
and power before us heaving up whatever it may bear, and we feel in an
immediate way its strong backward sagging when the rocks appear above it
as it falls. We have our hand on the throb of the current turning in a
salting river inland between green hills; we are borne upon it bodily as
we sail, its movement kicks the tiller in our grasp, and the strength
beneath us and around us, the rush and the compulsion of the stream, its
silence and as it were its purpose, all represent to us, immediately and