The passions are in morals, what motion is in physics; they create, preserve, and animate, and without them all would be silence and death. Avarice guides men across the deserts of the ocean; pride covers the earth with trophies, and mausoleums, and pyramids; love turns men from their savage rudeness; ambition shakes the very foundations of kingdoms. By the love of glory, weak nations swell into magnitude and strength. Whatever there is of terrible, whatever there is of beautiful in human events, all that shakes the soul to and fro, and is remembered while thought and flesh cling together, all these have their origin from the passions. As it is only in storms, and when their coming waters are driven up into the air, that we catch a sight of the depths of the sea, it is only in the season of perturbation that we have a glimpse of the real internal nature of man. It is then only that the might of these eruptions, shaking his frame, dissipates all the feeble coverings of opinion, and rends in pieces that cobweb vail with which fashion hides the feelings of the heart. It is then only that Nature speaks her genuine feelings; and, as at the last night of Troy, when Venus illumined the darkness, Æneas saw the gods themselves at work, so may we, when the blaze of passion is flung upon man's nature, mark in him the signs of a celestial origin, and tremble at the invisible agents of God! Look at great men in critical and perilous moments, when every cold and little spirit is extinguished: their passions always bring them out harmless, and at the very moment when they _seem_ to perish, they emerge into greater glory. Alexander in the midst of his mutinous soldiers; Frederick of Prussia, combating against the armies of three kingdoms; Cortes, breaking in pieces the Mexican empire: their passions led all these great men to fix their attention strongly upon the objects of their desires; they saw them under aspects unknown to, and unseen by common men, and which enabled them to conceive and execute those hardy enterprises, deemed rash and foolish, till their wisdom was established by their success. It is, in fact, the great passions alone which enable men to distinguish between what is difficult and what is impossible; a distinction always confounded by merely _sensible_ men, who do not even _suspect_ the existence of those means which men of genius employ to effect their object. It is only passion which gives a man that high enthusiasm for his country, and makes him regard it as the only object worthy of human attention; an enthusiasm which to common eyes appears madness and extravagance, but which always creates fresh powers of mind, and commonly insures their ultimate success. In fact, it is only the great passions which, tearing us away from the seductions of indolence, endow us with that continuity of attention, to which alone superiority of mind is attached. It is to their passions alone, under the providence