controlling one by the other, and confining each within its prescribed limits, does not fall within the scope of our present inquiries, as neither does the question, whether these bonds be not of a higher kind than naturalists commonly suppose? More immediately connected with, as also more important for our general subject, is the result which chemical analysis has so indubitably established, that in the natural world every object consists of living forces, and that properly nothing is rigid and dead, but all replete with hidden life. This colossal mountain range of petrified mummies which forms nature on the whole--this pyramid of graves, piled one over the other, is therefore, it is true, a historical monument of the past--of all the bygone ages of the world in the advancing development of death; but nevertheless, there is therein a latent vitality. Beneath the vast tombstone of the visible world there slumbers a soul, not wholly alien, but more than half akin to our own. This planetary and sensible world, and the earth-soul imprisoned therein, is only apparently dead. Nature does but sleep, and will, perhaps, ere long awake again. Sleep generally is, if not the essence, yet, at least, an essential signature and characteristic of nature. Every natural object partakes of it more or less. Not the animals only, but the very plants sleep; while in the vicissitudes of the seasons, and of their influences on the productive surface of the earth, and, in truth, on the whole planet, a perpetual alternation is perceptible between an awakening of life and a state of slumbering repose. Whatever, consequently, partakes, and requires the refreshment of sleep, belongs, even on that account, to nature. Painters, indeed, have given us pictures of sleeping angels or genii; but the pure spirits sleep not, and stand, in truth, in no need of such rest, and their activity is not subject to this necessity of alternate repose.