thought in my noon of hope and life, have sunk into
darkness. How is this? Sometimes I think that all light comes
through the heart into the mind; and when love is quenched, behold,
there is only darkness; the beauty and life and joy are gone. Ah,
woe is me! Have I nothing left?--no internal resources--no wealth of
knowledge, with which to minister to this poverty of hope and life?
It cannot be that all past efforts, all struggles and self-sacrifices,
to attain this coveted and natural knowledge, were useless, vain
mockeries. I thought I should live by this knowledge; that when the
outer life palled upon me, I could then retire within my own being
to boundless stores of riches and beauty. Well--this time has come,
and what do I find? Truly it is no Aladdin-palace, glittering with
gold and gems. It is more like a cavernous depth, stored with
rubbish, and from its dark deeps comes up an earthy odour, that almost
suffocates my spirit. But this is my all, and I must descend from the
life of the heart to the life of the mind, and scan my unsatisfactory
possessions.

Well, here is a world of childish, school-day lumber. Once it was a
great delight to me to learn that the world was round, and not
square; but I cannot see that a knowledge of that fact affords me
any great satisfaction now, for it has shaped itself to me as an
acute angle. And the earth's surface! how I used to glow with the
excitement of the bare thought of Rome! and Athens! and
Constantinople! and their thrilling histories and wonders of art,
and beauties of nature, seemed to me an indefinite world of
unattainable delight and ecstasy. But now, I have lived in all these
places, and the light and glory have gone. They have fallen within
the freezing light of reason. They are no longer like beautiful
dreams to me. They are squared down into fixed, unalterable facts. I
cannot gild them with any light of fancy; and I cannot extract from
them anything like the delight of my childhood. So I will turn from
these fixed facts and look out for those philosophical theories,
that gave me a later delight, as more interior mental pleasure.

Well, when I first broke through the shackles of the old childish
faith, Percy Bysshe Shelley was my high-priest. Through him I
thought I had come into a beautiful light of nature, vague, shadowy,
and grand, filling vast conceptions of the indefinite. He discarded
the God of the Hebrews, who was fashioned after their own narrow,
reveng