eful passions; a Being of wrath and war. And a brooding
spirit, an indefinite indwelling life of nature, was a new
revelation to me. I grew mystical and sublime and sentimental, in
this new mental perception. But I wearied of that. I could not walk
on stilts always, and I descended to the earth and read Voltaire,
and laughed and sneered at all the old forms and superstitions of
man. But this does not afford me any enjoyment now--the unhappy do
not feel like laughing at a ribald wit; but, alas! this rubbish is
stored here, and here I must live with it. It blackened and blurred
the pictures of the angels, that adorned my childish memories. It
wiped out all heavenly visions, and left only the earthly life.

But the human heart cannot live without a God; and I tried hard to
make one, for myself, through German pantheism. But I turn this
rubbish over disconsolately, for it is a material God, and does not
respond to one spiritual nature. It seems rather to react against
it. Alas! alas! I sink down into a Cimmerian darkness here; it seems
as if the Stygian pools of blackness had closed over me, and a cry
of anguish goes forth from my inmost soul, piercing the dark depths
to learn what is spirit? and what is God? What manner of existence
or unity of Being is He? Who is He? Where is He? And how can I
attain to a knowledge of Him? But through the echoing halls of my
dark mind, there is only a wailing sound of woe, of misery, of
disappointment, of a yearning anguish of spirit for a something
higher and better than I have ever yet conceived of or known.

But there is yet more of this mental rubbish. Ah! here is a whole
chapter of stuff--and I once thought it was so wise. I called it the
"progressive chain of being," and wove it out of the Pythagorean
philosophy. I said man's nature begins from the lowest, and ascends
to the highest. _Nature_ gives the impulse to life; and the flower
that blooms in South America may die, and its inner spirit may
clothe itself in a donkey born in Greece! and so it goes on
transfusing itself from clime to clime, in ever new and higher
forms, until man is developed. Well, was there ever such stuff
concocted before? I almost hear the bray of that donkey, who
originated in a flower. And pray, most sapient self! what is nature?
It seems _now_, to me, a _form_, a mere dead incubus of matter. And
could this inert tangible matter, sublimate in its hard, dead bosom,
an essence so subtle, as to be freer of t