Let us resume. Movement and matter, all is _ponderated_.
Inasmuch as matter is unequally distributed around the earth's centre, being flattened at the Poles and bulging at the Equator, it follows that the sun's enormous weight makes it vacillate, so that it describes at its axis a cone around the poles of the plane of its orbit. Its movement we see in the heavens in the precession of the equinoxes. But the terrestrial axis traces it tremblingly, because the moon, owing to its vicinity, exercises a perturbing action on our planet, which, in its turn, exercises on the moon a still more energetic influence.
[Footnote 38: Seneca, "Quæstiones Naturales," vi. 6.]
[Footnote 39: Lactantius, "De Falsa Sapientia," iii. 24.]
"There lives and works A soul in all things, and that soul is God."
We have returned, at least in an astronomical sense, to the budding, happy, radiant spring; the sun, in its apparent course, crosses the equinoctial line; the duration of the day, transiently equal to that of the night, will augment in proportion as the great luminary describes above our horizon greater and yet greater arcs of a circle. Yet this is not the budding, happy, radiant spring of the poets. No, if it be spring according to the law of universal gravitation, it is winter still by the law of life. The forest trees, such as the oak, the ash, the fir, and the beech, continue to present the image of death; and the sap which should reanimate them has not awakened from its winter sleep.
A solemn moment is it when the sap--that life-blood of the plant--arrested by the icy grasp of winter in its circulatory movement--receives a new impulse through the vivifying action of the central luminary of our system. What a subject for study and reflection!
[Illustration: FIG. 28.--Landscape in Winter.]
It has been very finely dealt with by Longfellow.
How wonderful! he exclaims,--and we only regard the wonder with indifference, because it is repeated annually,--how wonderful is the advent of spring!--the great annual miracle, as he calls it, of the blossoming of Aaron's rod, repeated on myriads and myriads of branches!--the gentle progression and growth of herbs, flowers, trees,--gentle, and yet irrepressible,--which no force can stay, no violence restrain,--like the influence of love, which wins its way, and cannot be withstood by any human power, because itself is divine power. True enough it is, that if spring came but once in a century, or burst forth with the terror of an earthquake, and not in silence, what wonder and expectation there would be in all hearts to behold the miraculous change! But now the silent succession suggests nothing but necessity. To most men, only the _cessation_ of the miracle would be miraculous, and the perpetual exercise of God's power seems less wonderful than its withdrawal would be.