I confess, my dear friends, it appears to me not easy to explain how the mind is enabled, desire it as much as it will, to pour its own capacities into insensate things. When Lear says, “Nature, hear! dear Goddess, hear!” his passion will not believe but that there is a hearer and executor of its curse; and it imagines nature capable of hearing. “If prayers can pierce the clouds and enter heaven, why then, give way, dull clouds, to my quick curses.” Does not all Passion that addresses itself to inanimate objects throw into them a feeling? Would not the Invocation be idle to the unresponsive and unhearing? This, then, is the nature of human passion, that, when vehement, it cannot conceive that its will is not to be fulfilled. If there are no adequate ministers, inadequate ministers must take their place. Inanimate things must become agents. “Rise, rise, ye wild tempests, and cover his flight.”—“Strike her young bones, ye taking airs, with lameness.” This is one demand, then, of passion, the execution of its purposes. Another demand of passion is sympathy. This, we know, is one of its first and strongest demands. If, then, men will not, or are not present to sympathise, that which surrounds must. The boiling passion finds it easier to believe that winds and rocks feel with it, than that it is sole, and cut off from all participation. Hence the more exuberant passion animates things, our own gladness animates nature. SEWARD. And how well has Adam Smith said how our sympathy includes the dead! Of all that feel not, it may with the readiest illusion embrace those who once felt; and what do we _know_ that they do not yet feel? Now, if this can be granted as the nature and power of passion, that, without any better ground than its own uncontrollable efflux, it can blend itself into that which is around it—that it believes lightnings and floods will destroy, merely from the intensity of will with which it wills them to destroy—though here the fitness for destruction is a reason; but if it imagines that, undestroying, they will rise to destroy, that peace shall be converted into danger, and sleep into anguish, that food shall not nourish, and winds shall not waft, rather than it shall be left without vengeance, or baffled; then may we say that there is in Passion an absolute power of carrying itself out into other existence, and that no other condition, in such existence, is necessary, save that it shall become _obviam_ to passion in its mood. If so, then, of course, any reason from analogy or causation becomes a very potent one to attract such passion and opinions formed by passion. Let this be established in passion at its fiercest, wildest height, and the principle is obtained. It is then the disposition of the mind under emotion to diffuse its emotion, bending the things around to suit its purposes, or at least filling them with sympathy with itself. In either case, upon this