ent in bygone times as to a future life, can scarcely
fail to attract notice. It is the so constant linking of the
soul's fate with the skyey spaces and the stars, in fond
explorings and astrologic dreams. Nowhere are the kingly greatness
and the immortal aspiring of man more finely shown. The loadstone
of his destiny and the prophetic gravitation of his thoughts are
upward, into the eternal bosom of heaven's infinite hospitality.

"Ye stars, which are the poetry of heaven!
If in your bright leaves we would read the fate
Of men and empires, 'tis to be forgiven,
That, in our aspirations to be great,
Our destinies o'erleap their mortal state
And claim a kindred with you; for ye are
A beauty and a mystery, and create
In us such love and reverence from afar
That fortune, fame, power, life, have named themselves a star."

What an immeasurable contrast between the dying Cherokee, who
would leap into heaven with a war whoop on his tongue and a string
of scalps in his hand, and the dying Christian, who sublimely
murmurs, "Father, into thy hands I commit my spirit!" What a sweep
of thought, from the poor woman whose pious notion of heaven was
that it was a place where she could sit all day in a clean white
apron and sing psalms, to the far seeing and sympathetic natural
philosopher whose loving faith embraces all ranks of creatures and
who conceives of paradise as a spiritual concert of the combined
worlds with all their inhabitants in presence of their Creator!
Yet from the explanatory considerations which have been set forth
we can understand the derivation of the multifarious swarm of
notions afloat in the world, as the fifteen hundred varieties of
apple now known have all been derived from the solitary white
crab. Differences of fancy and opinion among men are as natural as
fancies and opinions are. The mind of a people grows from the
earth of its deposited history, but breathes in the air of its
living literature.23 By his philosophic learning and poetic
sympathy the cosmopolitan scholar wins the last victory of mind
over matter, frees himself from local conditions and temporal
tinges, and, under the light of universal truth, traces, through
the causal influences of soil and clime and history, and the
colored threads of great individualities, the formation of
peculiar national creeds. Through sense the barbarian mind feeds
on the raw pabulum furnished by the immediate phenomena of the
world and of its own life. Throug