The glorious sun by day, and the moon and stars in the silence and the mystery of night, are felt to influence all material nature, holding the great Earth bound in a many-stranded cord which cannot be broken. The tidal flow of the vast ocean, with its variety of animal and vegetable life, the atmosphere, bright with light, obscured by the storm-cloud, spanned by the rainbow, or rent with the explosions of electric fire,--attest to the might of these elementary bonds. These are but a few of the great phenomena which play their part around this globe of ours, exciting men to wonder, or shaking them with terror. The mind of man, in its progress towards its higher destiny, is tasked with the physical earth as a problem, which, within the limits of a life, it must struggle to solve. The intellectual spirit is capable of embracing all finite things. Man is gifted with powers for studying the entire circle of visible creation; and he is equal, under proper training, to the task of examining much of the secret machinery which stirs the whole. In dim outshadowing, earth’s first poets, from the loveliness of external nature, evoked beautiful spiritualizations. To them the shady forests teemed with aërial beings,--the gushing springs rejoiced in fantastic sprites,--the leaping cataracts gleamed with translucent shades,--the cavernous hills were the abodes of genii,--and the earth-girdling ocean was guarded by mysterious forms. Such were the creations of the far-searching mind in its early consciousness of the existence of unseen powers. The philosopher picked out his way through the dark and labyrinthine path, between effects and causes, and slowly approaching towards the light, he gathered semblances of the great Reality, like a mirage, beautiful and truthful, although still but a cloud-reflection of the vast Unseen. It is thus that the human mind advances from the Ideal to the Real, and that the poet becomes the philosopher, and the philosopher rises into the poet; but at the same time as we progress from fable to fact, much of the soul-sentiment which made the romantic holy, and gave a noble tone to every aspiration, is too frequently merged in a cheerless philosophy which clings to the earth, and reduces the mind to a mechanical condition, delighting in the accumulation of facts, regardless of the great laws by which these are regulated, and the harmony of all Telluric combinations secured. In science we find the elements of the most exalted poetry; and in the mysterious workings of the physical forces we discover connections with the illimitable world of thought,--in which mighty minds delight to try their powers,--as strangely complicated, and as marvellously ordered, as in the psychological phenomena which have, almost exclusively, been the objects of their studies.