What a pitiful guide is the unaided light of human reason, when it grapples with the mysteries of creation! The good and great have lived in every land, and all have striven to elevate the soul of man above the grovelling passions and desires that link him with the brutes—pointing his attention to the future, and instilling a belief in other powers, by whose high best our destiny is governed, and whose wise decrees will prove hereafter the reward of virtue and the scourge of vice.—Yet what have they accomplished!—Each forms a Deity, whose attributes are the reflection of the physical objects which surround him, or the echo of his own ill-regulated feelings! In the bright regions of the East, where the unremitting ardor of the sun gives birth to an infinity of life, and the decaying plant or animal is scarce resolved into its elements, ere other forms start forth from its remains—_there_, the soul of man must wander from link to link in the great chain of Nature, till, purified by ages of distress, it merges into the very essence of the power supreme!—a power divided and engaged in an eternal contest with itself! a never-ceasing war between the principles of Good and Evil! In those distant regions of the North, where winter rules three-quarters of the year, and the orb of day, with look askance, but half illuminates man’s dwelling and his labors—where verdure, for a few days, clothes the hills with transitory grace; but all that seeks support from vegetable aliment is endowed with fleetness like the reindeer, or migrates, in the icy season, to more genial climes with the wild duck and the pigeon;—in that gloomy circle, where the frozen earth scarce yields a foot in depth to all the warming influence of summer, and men, curtailed of half the sad resource spared even in the primeval curse, swept with their robber hordes the provinces of their more fortunate neighbors until the iron art of war barred up the avenues to these precious granaries;—in that inhospitable region where dire necessity inters the living infant with the departed mother, and resigns the aged and decrepit to starvation!—the Parent of Good is a warrior armed, compelled to struggle fruitlessly with Fate, until, with Thor’s dread hammer in his hand, he yields, and breathes his last beneath the arm of liberated Locke! All! all contention!—Our very nature refuses credence in annihilation! Then— “When coldness wraps this suffering clay, Ah! whither flies the immortal mind!”