rest and nothingness--in this all contradictions and
contrarieties are mixt up and confounded, to petrify into an
indissoluble curse."

Edward was silent at first for a while: then not without emotion he
spake the following words: "I cannot understand what you say except in
part; for the bent of your thoughts and feelings I am an utter
stranger to. Whatever sorrows I have undergone, whatever unprofitable
or cheerless meditations I have indulged in, still I have never
strayed into these deserts, which lie, it would seem, at the horizon
of all such as abandon themselves with too passionate intensity to
captious inquiries. I have heard and read of strong minds, who in the
recklessness of passion, or in the extravagancies of love, strove to
burst the bolts of nature and of life, in order to become one with the
universe and to possess it. Despair, self-loathing, hatred of God,
have often been the doom and the unhappy lot of men thus under the
mastery of their impulses. We feel no doubt that reason is not
absolutely sufficient to reveal all that we wish to understand, to
reconcile all that we wish to see in harmony with the workings of the
deity. But it may be dangerous to seek for help in the regions of our
feelings and imagination, to give ear to our visionary forebodings.
They try to set up their own supremacy, and may easily fall out with
reason, though at the outset they seem to uphold her. If they gain
their aim, and this noble mediatorial power, which seated in the
centre of all our spiritual powers, irradiating and swaying them,
first converts them into true powers, is overthrown and cast into
chains by them, then each of our higher impulses begets a giant as its
son, that will war against God. For doubt, wit, unbelief, and scoffing
are not the only faculties that fight against God: our imagination,
our feelings, our enthusiasm do the same, though at first they seem to
supply faith with so safe and mysterious an asylum. Consequently, my
dear, my honoured friend, since our life is surrounded on all sides by
these dizzying precipices, and every path, whatever course it takes,
leads to them, what remains for us to do, except to trust with a
certain kind of light-heartedness, which perhaps is also one among the
noblest powers of our nature, with cheerfulness, gaiety, and humility,
in the existence and the love of that infinite inexhaustible love, of
that supreme wisdom, which puts on every shape, and can weave into its
w