He sees race after race of living things appear, as the
earth becomes, for each new and higher kind, a passing home; and he
watches the succession of terrible convulsions dividing kind from kind,
until at length the kind he calls his own arrives. Endless are the
visions of material grandeur unfathomable, awaked in his soul by the
bare facts of external existence.
But soon comes a change. So far as he can see or learn, all the motion,
all the seeming dance, is but a rush for death, a panic flight into the
moveless silence. The summer wind, the tropic tornado, the softest tide,
the fiercest storm, are alike the tumultuous conflict of forces,
rushing, and fighting as they rush, into the arms of eternal negation.
On and on they hurry--down and down, to a cold stirless solidity, where
wind blows not, water flows not, where the seas are not merely tideless
and beat no shores, but frozen cleave with frozen roots to their gulfy
basin. All things are on the steep-sloping path to final evanishment,
uncreation, non-existence. He is filled with horror--not so much of the
dreary end, as at the weary hopelessness of the path thitherward.
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