is of the gods, with its Titanic
majesty, and calm, celestial grace.

But next succeeds one of our hard, stern, misanthropical fits, in which
verjuice and aloes might be taken as the type of our condition, and we
propound strange heresies concerning the affections, social and
domestic; the leading one being that they are greater inlets to misery
than happiness, and that mankind would have been less wretched had they
grown up, like blades of grass, alone and separate; a cheerless
doctrine, but one which misanthropical logic legitimately deduces from
the more comprehensive one, that in this world evil is more potential
than good--more active and influential in its own nature. And we
bitterly call to mind all the treachery with which our trustfulness has
been met--our leaning on that broken reed, friendship--the placing our
whole hope and stay on some loved one who has failed us in our
extremity;--we call up (and how they throng at that call!) these gloomy
recollections, clad in all the terrors of the dark and indistinct past,
to build ourselves up in our gloomy creed. And in our utter weariness of
soul, the thought of an uninterrupted sentient existence is oppressive:
and we passionately wish that the rest of the grave might not be
vouchsafed to our body alone, but that our spirit also might sleep a
deep, tranquil sleep, until the great day of awakening. 'Tis a dreary
mood--like clouded moonlight on troubled, turbid waters! And we could
roast Love with his own torch--and we see every thing through crape
spectacles, and have no clarity for the softer, more refined emotions
and contemplations; so we plunge our head and ears into a chaos of most
musty, dusty metaphysics; and by the time we are nearly choked with
them, and have reasoned ourselves, first, out of all intercourse with an
external world, secondly, out of its existence, thirdly, out of our own,
we are right glad to be brought back to our senses, and our old love,
whom we embrace with all the ardour of reconciliation after a lover's
quarrel, and willingly yield ourselves to the humanizing effect of
music--grave or gay, as our mood may dictate, either perfect after its
kind.

Reader, should you haply be of the extreme North, has it ever chanced to
you to be present at our glorious English cathedral service? If not,
congratulate yourself on this enjoyment in reserve for you; and when you
next visit our end of the little island, pass not, we beseech you, those
Goth