"Our art almost compels us to look industriously around the world, and it is as if the miner were driven by a subterraneous fire. One mountain sends him to another. He never ceases his scrutiny, and during his whole life is gaining knowledge from that wonderful architecture, which has so curiously floored and wainscotted the earth under our feet. Our art is very ancient and extended. It may indeed, like our race, have migrated with the sun from the East toward the West, from the middle to the extremities. It has been obliged everywhere to combat with other difficulties; and as necessity continually urges the human spirit to wise inventions, so the miner can increase his knowledge and ability, and enrich his home with youthful experience." "You are well nigh inverted astrologers," said the hermit; "as they ceaselessly regard the sky, wandering through its immeasurable spaces, so do you turn your gaze to the earth, exploring its construction. Astrologers study the forces and influences of the stars, while you are discovering the forces of rocks and mountains, and the manifold properties of earth and stone strata. To them the higher world is a book of futurity; to you the earth is a memorial of the primeval world." "This connexion is not without its meaning," said the old man; "these shining prophets play perhaps a chief part in that old history of the wonderful creation. Men perhaps in the course of time will learn to understand them better, and to explain them by their operations, and inversely. Perhaps also the great mountain-chains exhibit the traces of their former ways, and perhaps they desired to support themselves without foreign aid, to take their own way to Heaven. Many raised themselves boldly enough that they might become stars, and therefore must now be deprived of the fair green vesture of the lower regions. They have therefore gained nothing, except the power of influencing the weather for their fathers, and of becoming prophets for the lower world, which now they protect, and now deluge with tempests."