L. It seems to me, on the whole, Mary, that the feelings of the purest and most mightily passioned human souls are likely to be the truest.  Not, indeed, if they do not desire to know the truth, or blind themselves to it that they may please themselves with passion; for then they are no longer pure:  but if, continually seeking and accepting the truth as far as it is discernible, they trust their Maker for the integrity of the instincts.  He has gifted them with, and rest in the sense of a higher truth which they cannot demonstrate, I think they will be most in the right, so.

Dora and Jessie (clapping their hands).  Then we really may believe that the mountains are living?

L. You may at least earnestly believe that the presence of the spirit which culminates in your own life, shows itself in dawning, wherever the dust of the earth begins to assume any orderly and lovely state.  You will find it impossible to separate this idea of gradated manifestation from that of the vital power.  Things are not either wholly alive, or wholly dead.  They are less or more alive.  Take the nearest, most easily examined instance—­the life of a flower.  Notice what a different degree and kind of life there is in the calyx and the corolla.  The calyx is nothing but the swaddling clothes of the flower; the child-blossom is bound up in it, hand and foot; guarded in it, restrained by it, till the time of birth.  The shell is hardly more subordinate to the germ in the egg, than the calyx to the blossom.  It bursts at last; but it never lives as the corolla does.  It may fall at the moment its task is fulfilled, as in the poppy; or wither gradually, as in the buttercup; or persist in a ligneous apathy, after the flower is dead, as in the rose; or harmonize itself so as to share in the aspect of the real flower, as in the lily; but it never shares in the corolla’s bright passion of life.  And the gradations which thus exist between the different members of organic creatures, exist no less between the different ranges of organism.  We know no higher or more energetic life than our own; but there seems to me this great good in the idea of gradation of life—­it admits the idea of a life above us, in other creatures, as much nobler than ours, as ours is nobler than that of the dust.

Mary.  I am glad you have said that; for I know Violet and Lucilla and May want to ask you something; indeed, we all do; only you frightened Violet so about the anthill, that she can’t say a word; and May is afraid of your teasing her, too:  but I know they are wondering why you are always telling them about heathen gods and goddesses, as if you half believed in them; and you represent them as good; and then we see there is really a kind of truth in the stories about them; and we are all puzzled:  and, in this, we cannot even make our difficulty quite clear to ourselves;—­it would be such a long confused question, if we could ask you all we should like to know.