And what if all of animated nature Be but organic harps diversly fram'd, That tremble into thought, as o'er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of All?

Some immensity of Being. It is to this that in reality all Nature points. The clouds, the skies, the greenery of earth, the myriad forms of vegetation at our feet, stir as these may the soul to its depths, they are but single chords in the orchestra of Life. It is the great pæan of Being that Nature chants. ... Through them it is that we detect the enormous but incomprehensible unity which underlies this incommensurable multiplicity. The wavelet's plash; the purl of the rill; the sough of the wind in the pines—these are but notes in the divine diapason of Life, of Life singing its cosmic song, unmindful who may hear.—Alas, that so few hear aught but a thin and scrannel sound!

Nature is an Æolian Harp, a musical instrument; whose tones again are keys to higher strings in us.

One existence, one music, one organism, one life, one God: star-fire and rock-strength, the sea's cold flow
And man's dark soul.

Every hidden cell is throbbing with music and life, every fiber thrilling like harp strings.

If melodiously piping flutes sprang from the olive, would you doubt that a knowledge of flute-playing resided in the olive? And what if plane trees bore harps which gave forth rhythmical sounds? Clearly you would think in the same way that the art of music was possessed by plane trees. Why, then, seeing that the universe gives birth to beings that are animate and wise, should it not be considered animate and wise itself?

On the harp of the road what true melodies are being sounded! and its notes pierce the heart:
There the Eternal Fountain is playing its endless life-streams of birth and death.

What is this thing called life? I believe
That the earth and the stars too, and the whole glittering universe, and rocks on the mountains have life,
Only we do not call it so — I speak of the life
That oxidizes fats and proteins and carbo-
Hydrates to live on, and from that chemical energy
Makes pleasure and pain, wonder, love, adoration, hatred and terror: how do these things grow
From a chemical reaction?
I think they were here already, I think the rocks
And the earth and the other planets, and the stars and the galaxies
have their various consciousness, all things are conscious;
But the nerves of an animal, the nerves and brain
Bring it to focus; the nerves and brain are like a burning-glass
To concentrate the heat and make it catch fire:
It seems to us martyrs hotter than the blazing hearth
From which it came. So we scream and laugh, clamorous animals
Born howling to die groaning: the old stones in the dooryard
Prefer silence; but those and all things have their own awareness,
As the cells of a man have; they feel and feed and influence each other, each unto all,
Like the cells of a man's body making one being,
They make one being, one consciousness, one life, one God.

The everlasting universe of things
Flows through the mind, and rolls its rapid waves,
Now dark — now glittering — now reflecting gloom — Now lending splendour, where from secret springs
The source of human thought its tribute brings.

The single spirit doth simultaneously temper the whole together; this is the single soul of all things; all are filled with God.

I buoyed me on the wings of dream, Above the world of sense; I set my thought to sound the scheme, And fathom the Immense; I tuned my spirit as a lute To catch wind-music wandering mute. Yet came there never voice nor sign; But through my being stole Sense of a Universe divine, And knowledge of a soul Perfected in the joy of things, The star, the flower, the bird that sings. Nor I am more, nor less, than these; All are one brotherhood; I and all creatures, plants, and trees, The living limbs of God; And in an hour, as this, divine, I feel the vast pulse throb in mine.