She sleeps there, for a time, like the _Sleeping Beauty in the Wood_. But sleep, captivity, enchantment, be it what it may, it is not Death. In the sponge, seemingly so dead, what life there is! It moves not, breathes not, has no organs of circulation, or of sense,--and yet it lives. How know we that, do you ask? Twice in every year the sponge reproduces. She lives after her fashion, and even more richly than many others. At the proper day, small spheres leave the mother sponge, armed with minute fins, which enable them for a short time to float about in full liberty, but soon coming to anchor, they remain there, growing, reproducing, till the sponge-hunter carries them to the habitations of man, to the service of the greater enslaver, man, the civilized. Thus, in the apparent absence of senses, and of all organization, in that mysterious enigma, at the doubtful threshold of life, generation opens up to us the visible world by which we are to ascend. As yet there is nothing, and in the bosom of that nothingness maternity already appears. As with the fabled gods of antique and mysterious Egypt, as with that old Isis and Osiris, who begat before their birth, here, also, Love exists before Being. CHAPTER IV. BLOOD-FLOWER. At the heart of the globe, in the warm waters of the Line, and upon their volcanic bottoms, the sea so superabounds in life that it seems impossible for it to balance its multitudinous creations. Overpassing purely vegetable life, its earliest products are organized, sensitive, living. But these animals adorn themselves with a singular splendor of botanic beauty, the splendid liveries of an eccentric and most luxuriant Flora. Far as the eye can reach, you see what, judging from the forms and colors, you take for flowers, and shrubs, and plants. But those plants have their movements, those shrubs are irritable, those flowers shrink and shudder with an incipient sensitiveness which promises, perception and _will_. Charming oscillation, fascinating motion, most graceful equivoque! On the confines of the two kingdoms of animal and vegetable life, Mind, under those faëry oscillations gives token of its first awakening, its dawn, its morning twilight, to be followed by a glorious and glowing noon. Those brilliant colors, those pearly and enamelled flashings, tell at once of the past night and the thought of the dawning day. Thought! may we venture to call it so? No, it is still a Dream, which by degrees will clear up into Thought.