There are days when the great are near us, when there is no frown on their brow, no condescension even; when they take us by the hand, and we share their thought. There are days which are the carnival of the year. The angels assume flesh, and repeatedly become visible. The imagination of the gods is excited, and rushes on every side into forms. Yesterday not a bird peeped; the world was barren, peaked, and pining: to-day ’tis inconceivably populous; creation swarms and meliorates. The days are made on a loom whereof the warp and woof are past and future time. They are majestically dressed, as if every god brought a thread to the skyey web. ’Tis pitiful the things by which we are rich or poor,--a matter of coins, coats, and carpets, a little more or less stone, or wood, or paint, the fashion of a cloak or hat; like the luck of naked Indians, of whom one is proud in the possession of a glass bead or a red feather, and the rest miserable in the want of it. But the treasures which Nature spent itself to amass,--the secular, refined, composite anatomy of man,--which all strata go to form, which the prior races, from infusory and saurian, existed to ripen; the surrounding plastic natures; the earth with its foods; the intellectual, temperamenting air; the sea with its invitations; the heaven deep with worlds; and the answering brain and nervous structure replying to these; the eye that looketh into the deeps, which again look back to the eye,--abyss to abyss;--these, not like a glass bead, or the coins or carpets, are given immeasurably to all. This miracle is hurled into every beggar’s hands. The blue sky is a covering for a market, and for the cherubim and seraphim. The sky is the varnish or glory with which the Artist has washed the whole work,--the verge or confines of matter and spirit. Nature could no farther go. Could our happiest dream come to pass in solid fact,--could a power open our eyes to behold “millions of spiritual creatures walk the earth,”--I believe I should find that mid-plain on which they moved floored beneath and arched above with the same web of blue depth which weaves itself over me now, as I trudge the streets on my affairs. ’Tis singular that our rich English language should have no word to denote the face of the world. _Kinde_ was the old English term, which, however, filled only half the range of our fine Latin word, with its delicate future tense,--_natura_, _about to be born_, or what German philosophy denotes as a _becoming_. But nothing expresses that power which seems to work for beauty alone. The Greek _Kosmos_ did; and therefore, with great propriety, Humboldt entitles his book, which recounts the last results of science, _Cosmos_.