endeavors, of our condensation and acceleration of
objects;--but nothing is gained; nature cannot be cheated; man's life
is but seventy salads long, grow they swift or grow they slow. In these
checks and impossibilities however we find our advantage, not less than
in the impulses. Let the victory fall where it will, we are on that
side. And the knowledge that we traverse the whole scale of being,
from the centre to the poles of nature, and have some stake in every
possibility, lends that sublime lustre to death, which philosophy and
religion have too outwardly and literally striven to express in the
popular doctrine of the immortality of the soul. The reality is more
excellent than the report. Here is no ruin, no discontinuity, no spent
ball. The divine circulations never rest nor linger. Nature is the
incarnation of a thought, and turns to a thought again, as ice becomes
water and gas. The world is mind precipitated, and the volatile essence
is forever escaping again into the state of free thought. Hence the
virtue and pungency of the influence on the mind of natural objects,
whether inorganic or organized. Man imprisoned, man crystallized,
man vegetative, speaks to man impersonated. That power which does not
respect quantity, which makes the whole and the particle its equal
channel, delegates its smile to the morning, and distils its essence
into every drop of rain. Every moment instructs, and every object: for
wisdom is infused into every form. It has been poured into us as blood;
it convulsed us as pain; it slid into us as pleasure; it enveloped us
in dull, melancholy days, or in days of cheerful labor; we did not guess
its essence until after a long time.

*****

POLITICS.

Gold and iron are good
To buy iron and gold;
All earth's fleece and food
For their like are sold.
Boded Merlin wise,
Proved Napoleon great,--
Nor kind nor coinage buys
Aught above its rate.
Fear, Craft, and Avarice
Cannot rear a State.
Out of dust to build
What is more than dust,--
Walls Amphion piled
Phoebus stablish must.
When the Muses nine
With the Virtues meet,
Find to their design
An Atlantic seat,
By green orchard boughs
Fended from the heat,
Where the statesman ploughs
Furrow for the wheat;
When the Church is social worth,
When the state-house is the hearth,
Then the perfect State is come