are adornings." What loftiness and awe have I seen expressed in
the step of an actress, not yet deceased, when first she advanced, and
came down towards the audience! I was ravished, and with difficulty kept
my seat! Pass we to the mazes of the dance, the inimitable charms and
picturesque beauty that may be given to the figure while still unmoved,
and the ravishing grace that dwells in it during its endless changes and
evolutions.

The upright figure of man produces, incidentally as it were, and by the
bye, another memorable effect. Hence we derive the power of meeting
in halls, and congregations, and crowded assemblies. We are found "at
large, though without number," at solemn commemorations and on festive
occasions. We touch each other, as the members of a gay party are
accustomed to do, when they wait the stroke of an electrical machine,
and the spark spreads along from man to man. It is thus that we have
our feelings in common at a theatrical representation and at a public
dinner, that indignation is communicated, and patriotism become
irrepressible.

One man can convey his sentiments in articulate speech to a thousand;
and this is the nursing mother of oratory, of public morality, of public
religion, and the drama. The privilege we thus possess, we are indeed
too apt to abuse; but man is scarcely ever so magnificent and so awful,
as when hundreds of human heads are assembled together, hundreds of
faces lifted up to contemplate one object, and hundreds of voices
uttered in the expression of one common sentiment.

But, notwithstanding the infinite beauty, the magazine of excellencies
and perfections, that appertains to the human body, the mind claims,
and justly claims, an undoubted superiority. I am not going into an
enumeration of the various faculties and endowments of the mind of man,
as I have done of his body. The latter was necessary for my purpose.
Before I proceeded to consider the ascendancy of mind, the dominion and
loftiness it is accustomed to assert, it appeared but just to recollect
what was the nature and value of its subject and its slave.

By the mind we understand that within us which feels and thinks, the
seat of sensation and reason. Where it resides we cannot tell, nor
can authoritatively pronounce, as the apostle says, relatively to a
particular phenomenon, "whether it is in the body, or out of the body."
Be it however where or what it may, it is this which constitutes the
great essence of