But it is all a mistake; the loftiest strains which ever inspired the soul of Mozart or of Beethoven had not the ineffable harmony, nor the sweetest songs of the greatest poets the perfect rhyme, ever repeated and ever varied, of the universe. Its orderly progress is like the onward movement of a mighty army, and there is but one grand commander, "but one God," and Nature, that showeth forth his handiwork, "is his prophet." We have found that the "course of nature," the eternally youthful mother, is the same, whether in spinning a tendril in the garden, in weaving a whirlwind in the atmosphere, or in elaborating from the universal vapors of primordial space a solar system or a galaxy. And it is not a convulsive, spasmodic nature that we find; we do not love to associate great explosions, cataclysms, the destruction of worlds, or the extinction of suns with our ideas of nature. These seem not to be of nature. The nature we love is the gentle mother, uniform in her operations, kindly in her ways, beneficent in her results; the nature of the rain, the sunshine, seed-time and harvest and the sprouting seed again; ever patient, ever responsive, but in all as firm and steadfast as the foundations of eternity itself. So we have found her. We have assumed nothing; we have observed and endeavored to deduce from observation her systematic plan, for this is the voice of her law, "the same yesterday, to-day, and forever." To quote the words of Matthew Arnold, from out the darkness of the past we seem to hear her say,-- "Will ye claim for your great ones the gift To have rendered the gleam of my skies? Race after race, man after man, Have thought that my secret was theirs, --They are dust, they are changed, they are gone! I remain." End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Source and Mode of Solar Energy Throughout the Universe, by Isaac Winter Heysinger