feel the night of scepticism gathering around
you--bury them all, powerful though you may have deemed their spells to
illuminate the unfathomable--open your Bible, and all the spiritual
world will be as bright as day.

The disease of the body may cause disease to the soul. Ay, madness. Some
rapture in the soul makes the brain numb, and thence sudden or lingering
death;--some rupture in the brain makes the soul insane, and thence life
worse than death, and haunted by horrors beyond what is dreamt of the
grave and all its corruption. Perhaps the line fullest of meaning that
ever was written, is--

"Mens sana in corpore sano."

When nature feels the flow of its vital blood pure and unimpeded, what
unutterable gladness bathes the spirit in that one feeling of--health!
Then the mere consciousness of existence is like that emotion which
Milton speaks of as breathed from the bowers of Paradise--

"Vernal delight and joy, able to drive
All sadness but despair"

It does more--for despair itself cannot prevail against it. What a dawn
of bliss rises upon us with the dawn of light, when our life is
healthful as the sun! Then

"It feels that it is greater than it knows."

God created the earth and the air beautiful through the senses; and at
the uplifting of a little lid, a whole flood of imagery is let in upon
the spirit, all of which becomes part of its very self, as if the
enjoying and the enjoyed were one. Health flies away like an angel, and
her absence disenchants the earth. What shadows then pass over the
ethereal surface of the spirit, from the breath of disordered
matter!--from the first scarcely-felt breath of despondency, to the last
scowling blackness of despair! Often men know not what power placed the
fatal fetters upon them--they see even that a link may be open, and that
one effort might fling off the bondage; but their souls are in slavery,
and will not be free. Till something like a fresh wind, or a sudden
sunbeam, comes across them, and in a moment their whole existence is
changed, and they see the very vanishing of their most dismal and
desperate dream.

"Somewhat too much of this"--so let us strike the chords to a merrier
measure--to a "livelier lilt"--as suits the variable spirit of our
Soliloquy. Be it observed, then, that the sole certain way of getting
rid of the blue devils, is to drown them in a shower-bath. You would not
suppose that we are subject to the blue devils? Yet we are