L. I call you back to that, because I must warn you against an old
error of my own. Somewhere in the fourth volume of "Modern
Painters," I said that the earth seemed to have passed through its
highest state: and that, after ascending by a series of phases,
culminating in its habitation by man, it seems to be now gradually
becoming less fit for that habitation.
MARY. Yes, I remember.
L. I wrote those passages under a very bitter impression of the
gradual perishing of beauty from the loveliest scenes which I knew
in the physical world;--not in any doubtful way, such as I might
have attributed to loss of sensation in myself--but by violent and
definite physical action; such as the filling up of the Lac de
Chede by landslips from the Rochers des Fiz;--the narrowing of the
Lake Lucerne by the gaining delta of the stream of the Muotta-
Thal, which, in the course of years, will cut the lake into two,
as that of Brientz has been divided from that of Thun;--the steady
diminishing of the glaciers north of the Alps, and still more, of
the sheets of snow on their southern slopes, which supply the
refreshing streams of Lombardy:--the equally steady increase of
deadly maremma round Pisa and Venice; and other such phenomena,
quite measurably traceable within the limits even of short life,
and unaccompanied, as it seemed, by redeeming or compensatory
agencies. I am still under the same impression respecting the
existing phenomena; but I feel more strongly, every day, that no
evidence to be collected within historical periods can be accepted
as any clue to the great tendencies of geological change; but that
the great laws which never fail, and to which all change is
subordinate, appear such as to accomplish a gradual advance to
lovelier order, and more calmly, yet more deeply, animated Rest.
Nor has this conviction ever fastened itself upon me more
distinctly, than during my endeavor to trace the laws which govern
the lowly framework of the dust. For, through all the phases of
its transition and dissolution, there seems to be a continual
effort to raise itself into a higher state; and a measured gain,
through the fierce revulsion and slow renewal of the earth's
frame, in beauty, and order, and permanence. The soft white
sediments of the sea draw themselves, in process of time, into
smooth knots of sphered symmetry; burdened and strained under
increase of pressure, they pass into a nascent marble; scorched by
fervent heat, they brighten and blanch into the snowy rock of
Paros and Carrara. The dark drift of the inland river, or stagnant
slime of inland pool and lake, divides, or resolves itself as it
dries, into layers of its several elements; slowly purifying each
by the patient withdrawal of it from the anarchy of the mass in
which it was mingled. Contracted by increasing drought, till it
must shatter into fragments, it infuses continually a finer ichor
into the opening veins, and finds in its weakness the first
rudiments of a perfect strength. Rent at last, rock from rock,
nay, atom from atom, and tormented in lambent fire, it knits,
through the fusion, the fibers of a perennial endurance; and,
during countless subsequent centuries, declining, or, rather let
me say, rising, to repose, finishes the infallible luster of its
crystalline beauty, under harmonies of law which are wholly
beneficent, because wholly inexorable.
(The children seem pleased, but more inclined to think over these
matters than to talk.)
L. (after giving them a little time). Mary, I seldom ask you to
read anything out of books of mine; but there is a passage about
the Law of Help, which I want you to read to the children now,
because it is of no use merely to put it in other words for them.
You know the place I mean, do not you?
MARY. Yes (presently finding it); where shall I begin?
L. Here, but the elder ones had better look afterwards at the
piece which comes just before this.