For who am I, that I should know the hundredth part of the forms on which we look ?--And above all you catch a glimpse of that crimson mass of Norantea which we admired just now; and, black as yew against the blue sky and white cloud, the plumes of one Palmiste, who has climbed toward the light, it may be for centuries, through the green cloud; and now, weary and yet triumphant, rests her dark head among the bright foliage of a Ceiba, and feeds unhindered on the sun.
There, take your tired eyes down again; and turn them right, or left, or where you will, to see the same scene, and yet never the same.

New forms, new combinations; a wealth of creative Genius--let us use the wise old word in its true sense--incomprehensible by the human intellect or the human eye, even as He is who makes it all, Whose garment, or rather Whose speech, it is.

The eye is not filled with seeing, or the ear with hearing; and never would be, did you roam these forests for a hundred years.

How many years would you need merely to examine and discriminate the different species?
And when you had done that, how many more to learn their action and reaction on each other?
How many more to learn their virtues, properties, uses?
How many more to answer the perhaps ever unanswerable question--How they exist and grow at all?
By what miracle they are compacted out of light, air, and water, each after its kind?
How, again, those kinds began to be, and what they were like at first?
Whether those crowded, struggling, competing shapes are stable or variable?
Whether or not they are varying still?
Whether even now, as we sit here, the great God may not be creating, slowly but surely, new forms of beauty round us?
Why not?
If He chose to do it, could He not do it?
And even had you answered that question, which would require whole centuries of observation as patient and accurate as that which Mr.Darwin employed on Orchids and climbing plants, how much nearer would you be to the deepest question of all--Do these things exist, or only appear?
Are they solid realities, or a mere phantasmagoria, orderly indeed, and law- ruled, but a phantasmagoria still; a picture-book by which God speaks to rational essences, created in His own likeness?
And even had you solved that old problem, and decided for Berkeley or against him, you would still have to learn from these forests a knowledge which enters into man, not through the head, but through the heart; which (let some modern philosophers say what they will) defies all analysis, and can be no more defined or explained by words than a mother's love.

I mean, the causes and the effects of their beauty; that 'AEsthetic of plants,' of which Schleiden has spoken so well in that charming book of his, The Plant, which all should read who wish to know somewhat of 'The Open Secret.' But when they read it, let them read with open hearts.