It is a humiliating thing to review the aberrations of the human mind: and, believe me, reader, my intention in reviewing these instances of religious fanaticism has been not to excite a smile of transient merriment, nor for a moment to call in question the {88} reality of true devotion. My intention has been to show to what extremes of preposterous folly man may be hurried when he once resigns himself to the vagaries of fancy upon a subject which demands the severest deductions of reason. It is, indeed, a _melancholy_ consideration, that, in a country like our own, which we fondly look upon as the hope of the world, and amid the full-orbed effulgence of the nineteenth century, there should exist a body of men, more than twelve thousand in number, as is estimated, professing belief in a faith so unutterably absurd as that styled Mormonism; a faith which would have disgraced the darkest hour of the darkest era of our race.[202] But it is not for me to read the human _heart_. _Shelbyville, Ill._ XXX "The day is lowering; stilly black Sleeps the grim waste, while heaven's rack, Dispersed and wild, 'tween earth and sky Hangs like a shatter'd canopy!" _Fire-worshippers._ "Rent is the fleecy mantle of the sky; The clouds fly different; and the sudden sun By fits effulgent gilds the illumined fields, And black by fits the shadows sweep along." THOMSON. "The bleak winds Do sorely ruffle; for many miles about There's scarce a bush." _Lear, Act 2._ "These are the Gardens of the Desert." BRYANT.