is strictly confined to
the objects before us, and which we do not, either directly or indirectly,
refer to something beyond and not present. Now have we at all times a
distinct consciousness of the things referred to? Are they not rather more
often vague, and only indicated in some _undefined_ feeling? Nay, is its
source more intelligible where the feeling is more definite, when taking
the form of a sense of harmony, as from something that diffuses, yet
deepens, unbroken in its progress through endless variations, the melody
as it were of the pleasurable object? Who has never felt, under certain
circumstances, an expansion of the heart, an elevation of mind, nay, a
striving of the whole being to pass its limited bounds, for which he could
find no adequate solution in the objects around him,--the apparent cause?
Or who can account for every mood that thralls him,--at times like one
entranced in a dream by airs from Paradise,--at other times steeped in
darkness, when the spirit of discord seems to marshal his every thought,
one against another?

Whether it be that the Living Principle, which permeates all things
throughout the physical world, cannot be touched in a single point
without conducting to its centre, its source, and confluence, thus
giving by a part, though obscurely and indefinitely, a sense of the
whole,--we know not. But this we may venture to assert, and on no
improbable ground,--that a ray of light is not more continuously
linked in its luminous particles than our moral being with the
whole moral universe. If this be so, may it not give us, in a faint
shadowing at least, some intimation of the many real, though unknown
relations, which everywhere surround and bear upon us? In the deeper
emotions, we have, sometimes, what seems to us a fearful proof of it.
But let us look at it negatively; and suppose a case where this chain
is broken,--of a human being who is thus cut off from all possible
sympathies, and shut up, as it were, in the hopeless solitude of
his own mind. What is this horrible avulsion, this impenetrable
self-imprisonment, but the appalling state of _despair?_ And what
if we should see it realized in some forsaken outcast, and hear his
forlorn cry, "Alone! alone!" while to his living spirit that single
word is all that is left him to fill the blank of space? In such a
state, the very proudest autocrat would yearn for the sympathy of the
veriest wretch.

It would seem, then, since this living