t
woman not despair. What use will there be for the reflective reason,
when 'we shall know even as we are known,' and the vision in God shall
make the spontaneous bliss of immortality?

The habit of only seeing, only studying, only analyzing the finite, is
very apt to inspire the savant with a peculiar distrust of all
spontaneous emotion. Ceasing to open his heart to that light from the
Absolute, which ought to quicken it into bloom, it learns to dwell only
in the sterile world of abstract formulas. If he could find algebraic
signs for its expression, he would willingly believe in the immortality
of the soul: the characters which he can never learn to comprehend, are
precisely those in which dwell the intuitions of the infinite. He piques
himself upon the precision of his language, not perceiving it has gained
this boasted prim exactitude at the expense of breadth and depth. All
honor to the savant! but let him keep the lamp of spontaneity ever
burning in his soul. By its light the savage and the woman divine God;
without it, he may weigh creation--and 'find Him not!'

Nothing can be more superficial than the intellects of men given over to
formulas. They always imagine they can explore the depths of truth, if
they can succeed in detecting an inch of its surface. When they arrive
at the term of their own ideas, they believe they have exhausted the
absolute. They frequently want feeling, because they have, in some way,
destroyed their own spontaneity--that inexhaustible source of living and
original thought, individualized and yet universal, of ever-thronging
and vivid emotions.

The most spontaneous writer of the present day is a woman; fresh,
rugged, rich, and natural, as the wayside gold of the Dandelion above
described by Lowell--hence her sudden and great popularity with the
people. She feels strongly, and thinks justly, and fears not to say what
the great God gives her. May she continue to pour her 'wayside gold'
through the literary waves of the 'Atlantic'--and still keep the molten
treasure bright and burnished for the service of our altar. Let her not
fly too near the candles of the clergy, and thus sear her Psyche wings.
Need I name Gail Hamilton? Pardon the digression, courteous reader, and
let a woman greet a gifted sister as she passes on.

Let me not be misunderstood in my estimate of the spontaneous and
reflective faculties: they must _combine_ in any man _truly great_. If I
have dwelt on spontaneity,