love to say his midnight prayers among the moonlit hills.

In modern times all those who have been endowed with the sense of the Infinite have loved the mountain gloom and the mountain glory. Even a scientist like John Tyndall acknowledges the peculiar power of the high Alps to impress the mind of the beholder. A man need not be religious, he declares, but only complete, to feel awe and reverence amid these scenes.

One of the most striking instances of the spiritual power of the mountains is the conversion, if we may so call it, of Goethe, during the fateful visit to the Harz in the winter of 1777-78. He had always felt himself a poet of nature, had loved her woods and caves and cliffs; had drawn from her power and strength; and in communion with her, he caught new glimpses of the wonders of creation, as well as of his own heart. But the climax of this communion with nature came during the ascent of the Brocken in December, 1777. "Here," he cries, " on this eldest, eter

nal altar, built directly upon the foundations of Creation, I bring my sacrifice to the Being of 'all Beings." From that time on, says his most recent biographer, Bielschowsky, he felt himself to be one loved by God and led by God. He began to feel reverence for the divine in his own nature, and to strive to keep and develop it in all its purity. Henceforth, a change came over him; though he was in the world, he was not of the world. His eye was turned inward, and he feels a continually growing sense of aloofness, "reine Entfremdung von den Menschen," he calls it. We find frequent reference to this transcendental mood in his note books; thus in February, 1778, he writes: "This week spent much time on the ice, in ever tranquil, almost too purified mood. Beautiful flashes of insight into myself. Quietness and a presentiment of the truth." Again, "I am not born for this world;" and still again, "Now I live among the men of this world, and eat and drink and even jest with them, but I scarcely perceive them, for my inner life goes on its irremovable way." And

all this mystical, transcendental experience found its rise in the memorable journey among the Harz mountains.

While almost every other phase of nature has undergone a change in its effect on mankind, the starry universe has from the beginning of time exercised a strange fascination over the minds of men, and more than any other natural object has turned their thoughts to the Infinite. The same feeling of majesty and infinite power that overwhelmed the Psalmist and caused him to cry out " When I consider the heavens, the work of Thy fingers, the moon and the stars which Thou hast ordained, what is man that Thou art mindful of him, and the son of man that Thou visitest him?", filled the heart and mind of the founder of the transcendental philosophy, Immanuel Kant, when, astounded and overwhelmed by the infinite spaces of the stellar universe, which the telescope of Herschel had for the first time revealed to wondering man, he uttered the famous words: "Two things fill my mind with ever new and increasing

wonder and awe, the more often and longer my thoughts busy themselves therewith; the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

All these phases of nature which have hitherto been discussed belong to our own sphere. But there is one final step in all nature observation in which no longer details, or groups, however wide and vast they may be, but the earth and the universe as a whole is considered.

This phase of the transcendental sense is not entirely modern; although varying in details, as was natural in the case of those to whom the true astronomy was unknown, we find it in the old poems of the Vedas, as well as in the literature of Greece and Rome. We find it all through the noble poem of Lucretius, and it forms the basis of the Empedoclean doctrine of love and hate, and the Stoic fancy of a series of recurring universes, in which all things reappear in the same form. In the old Northern Teutonic mythology this cosmic view takes on a grandeur of lofty imagination;

and we are still fascinated as we read of Balder the Beautiful, whose death is an ominous prelude to the destruction of the world, when "the sun begins to darken, the earth sinks into the sea, the bright stars vanish from heaven; vapor and fire rage, the high flame licks the sky;" and then after an indeterminate period has elapsed-a new earth and a rejuvenated race of the gods arise from the waters:-" A second time I see the earth come forth from the sea, in fresh verdure; cascades fall, the eagle soars on high, which in the mountains preys on flesh."

The discovery of radium, bringing with it the necessity of reconstructing the theory as to the ultimate form of matter, has brought in once more the old Empedoclean fancy of the rise and fall of the universe. There is a wonderful touch of imagination in the following words of Professor Crookes, whether the theory they express be true or not:-" The fatal quality of atomic dissociation appears to be universal, and operates whenever we brush a piece of glass with silk; it works in the sun