Page:Letters from England.djvu/48

 ful sea-shells collected from a timeless ocean. Be ye also like nature; create, create, things strange, beautiful, fluted or twisted, pied and translucent; the more lavishly, strangely and purely you create, the nearer will you be to nature or perhaps to God. Mighty is nature.

But I must not forget the crystals, their shapes, laws and colours. There are crystals as big as cathedral pillars, delicate as mildew and sharp as needles; plain, blue, green like nothing in the world, of fiery colours or black; mathematical, perfect, like the contrivances of queer and bewildered sages; or recalling livers, hearts, gigantic human organs and animal fluids. There are crystalline caves or spectral bubbles or mineral dough; there is mineral fermenting, grilling, growth, architecture and engineering; I vow that a Gothic church is not the most complicated of crystals. Even within us there persists a crystalline power; even Egypt crystallized in pyramids and obelisks, Greece in pillars, Gothic in pinaches and London in cubes of black mud; countless laws of structure and