These cases of infancy, reached at intervals by special revelations, or creating for itself, through it privileged silence of heart, authentic whispers of truth, or beauty, or power, have some analogy to those other cases, more directly supernatural, in which (according to the old traditional faith of our ancestors) deep messages of admonition reached an individual through sudden angular deflexions of words, uttered or written, that had not been originally addressed to himself. Of these there were two distinct classes--those where the person concerned had been purely passive; and, secondly, those in which he himself had to some extent coöperated. The first class have been noticed by Cowper, the poet, and by George Herbert, the well-known pious brother of the still better-known infidel, Lord Herbert, (of Cherbury,) in a memorable sonnet; scintillations they are of what seems nothing less than providential lights oftentimes arresting our attention, from the very centre of what else seems the blank darkness of chance and blind accident. "Books lying open, millions of surprises,"--these are among the cases to which Herbert (and to which Cowper) alludes,--books, that is to say, left casually open without design or consciousness, from which some careless passer-by, when throwing the most negligent of glances upon the page, has been startled by a solitary word lying, as it were, in ambush, waiting and lurking for _him_, and looking at him steadily as an eye searching the haunted places of his conscience. These cases are in principle identical with those of the _second_ class, where the inquirer himself coöperated, or was not entirely passive; cases such as those which the Jews called Bath-col, or daughter of a voice, (the echo [1] augury,) viz., where a man, perplexed in judgment and sighing for some determining counsel, suddenly heard from a stranger in some unlooked-for quarter words not meant for himself, but clamorously applying to the difficulty besetting him. In these instances, the mystical word, that carried a secret meaning and message to one sole ear in the world, was unsought for: _that_ constituted its virtue and its divinity; and to arrange means wilfully for catching at such casual words, would have defeated the purpose. A well-known variety of augury, conducted upon this principle, lay in the "Sortes Biblicae," where the Bible was the oracular book consulted, and far more extensively at a later period in the "Sortes Virgilianae," [2] where the Aeneid was the oracle consulted.