In these desultory remarks on a variety of suggested topics, we have attempted to illustrate the radical distinction between vitality and mechanism, impassioned imagination and logical understanding, the communication of mental life and the imparting of lifeless information, as that distinction applies to all things which occupy human attention and stimulate human effort. We have indicated, in a gossiping way, the dangerous ease with which the mechanical supersedes the vital in those departments of knowledge and affairs which originated in the mind’s creative and organizing energy; in society, in governments, in laws, literature and institutions, in ethical, mental and physical science; and have tried to show that such an usurpation of torpor over activity dulls and deadens the soul, makes existence a weakness and weariness, and mocks our eyes with nothing but the show and semblance of power. A man of mechanical understanding can but exist his four-score years and ten, and a dreary time he has of it at that, bored and boring all his few and tiresome years; but a live mind has the power of wonderfully condensing time, and lives a hundred common years in one. From the phenomena presented by men of genius we can affirm the soul’s immortality, because they give some evidence of the joy, the ecstasy, involved in the idea of life; but to a mechanical being, endowed with a spark of vitality sufficient only to sting him with rebuking possibilities, an endless existence would be but an endless ennui. The ground for hope is, that man, using as he may all the resource of stupid cunning, cannot kill the germ of life which lies buried in him; hatred and pride, the sins of the heart, may eat into it, and his “pernicious soul” seem, like Iago’s, to “rot half a grain a day;” mechanism, the sin of the head, may withdraw itself into “good common sense,” and contentedly despise the joyous power of vital action; but still the immortal principle constituting the Person survives—patient, watchful, persistent, unconquerable, refusing to capitulate, refusing to die. P. * * * * * SONNETS. BY ALFRED B. STREET. I.—CELINE.