ain, and closing again as rapidly, of scenes that
made the future heaven of my life? And how was it that in thought I
_was_, and yet in reality _was not_, a denizen, already, in 1803, 1804,
1805, of lakes and forest lawns, which I never saw till 1807? and that,
by a prophetic instinct of heart, I rehearsed and lived over, as it
were, in vision those chapters of my life which have carried with them
the weightiest burden of joy and sorrow, and by the margin of those very
lakes and hills with which I prefigured this connection? and, in short,
that for me, by a transcendent privilege, during the novitiate of my
life, most truly I might say:

'"In to-day already walked to-morrow."'

4.--THE PRINCESS WHO OVERLOOKED ONE SEED IN A POMEGRANATE.

There is a story told in the 'Arabian Nights' of a princess who, by
overlooking one seed of a pomegranate, precipitated the event which she
had laboured to make impossible. She lies in wait for the event which
she foresees. The pomegranate swells, opens, splits; the seeds, which
she knows to be roots of evil, rapidly she swallows; but one--only
one--before it could be arrested, rolls away into a river. It is lost!
it is irrecoverable! She has triumphed, but she must perish. Already she
feels the flames mounting up which are to consume her, and she calls for
water hastily--not to deliver herself (for that is impossible), but,
nobly forgetting her own misery, that she may prevent that destruction
of her brother mortal which had been the original object for hazarding
her own. Yet why go to Arabian fictions? Even in our daily life is
exhibited, in proportions far more gigantic, that tendency to swell and
amplify itself into mountains of darkness, which exists oftentimes in
germs that are imperceptible. An error in human choice, an infirmity in
the human will, though it were at first less than a mote, though it
should swerve from the right line by an interval less than any thread

'That ever spider twisted from her womb,'

sometimes begins to swell, to grow, to widen its distance rapidly,
travels off into boundless spaces remote from the true centre, spaces
incalculable and irretraceable, until hope seems extinguished and return
impossible. Such was the course of my own opium career. Such is the
history of human errors every day. Such was the original sin of the
Greek theories on Deity, which could not have been healed but by putting
off their own nature, and kindling into