at she may
be led into the large poetry of the universe! Often I listen to her
careless talk, and find oracles in its unconscious beauty, as we find
strange virtues in some lonely flower. I see her mind ripening under my
eyes; and in its fair fertility what ever-teeming novelties of thought!
O Mejnour! how many of our tribe have unravelled the laws of the
universe,--have solved the riddles of the exterior nature, and deduced
the light from darkness! And is not the POET, who studies nothing but
the human heart, a greater philosopher than all? Knowledge and atheism
are incompatible. To know Nature is to know that there must be a God.
But does it require this to examine the method and architecture of
creation? Methinks, when I look upon a pure mind, however ignorant and
childlike, that I see the August and Immaterial One more clearly than in
all the orbs of matter which career at His bidding through space.

Rightly is it the fundamental decree of our order, that we must impart
our secrets only to the pure. The most terrible part of the ordeal is
in the temptations that our power affords to the criminal. If it were
possible that a malevolent being could attain to our faculties, what
disorder it might introduce into the globe! Happy that it is NOT
possible; the malevolence would disarm the power. It is in the purity of
Viola that I rely, as thou more vainly hast relied on the courage or the
genius of thy pupils. Bear me witness, Mejnour! Never since the distant
day in which I pierced the Arcana of our knowledge, have I ever sought
to make its mysteries subservient to unworthy objects; though, alas! the
extension of our existence robs us of a country and a home; though the
law that places all science, as all art, in the abstraction from the
noisy passions and turbulent ambition of actual life, forbids us to
influence the destinies of nations, for which Heaven selects ruder and
blinder agencies; yet, wherever have been my wanderings, I have sought
to soften distress, and to convert from sin. My power has been hostile
only to the guilty; and yet with all our lore, how in each step we are
reduced to be but the permitted instruments of the Power that vouchsafes
our own, but only to direct it. How all our wisdom shrinks into nought,
compared with that which gives the meanest herb its virtues, and peoples
the smallest globule with its appropriate world. And while we are
allowed at times to influence the happiness of others, how myst