It is a curious fact that scarcely one illustrious man, remarkable for knowledge or genius, convicted of doubt in the agency of a Providence, but has been in his own person the slave of superstition; while attempting to throw off the yoke of servitude, submitting to become threefold slaves. In the blind eagerness of their pride to arrogate to their own merit the power or glory they have attained—those deep-seated instincts of religion which they have attempted to stifle in their souls—thrust out of their natural channel—force a way of their own towards daylight, and acquire a wild and irregular character. The homage they arrest in its course to heaven, falls back upon the earth. They would fain judge, though they refuse to believe; and the genius whose horizon they have circumscribed, requites the forced contraction by seeing things in part instead of a whole, and losing all power of estimating the homogeneous design of the great Master of all! They attach themselves to details, because an isolated fact is within the scope of their judgment, and do not so much as notice the points of union which connect it with universal nature. For what is the whole creation—earth, air, water—the winds, the waves, the stars—mankind—the universe, but an infinite being, complete, premeditated, varied into inscrutable details, and breathing and palpitating under the omnipresent hand of GOD? Subdued, however, by the strength of his pride and the weakness of his health, Charney saw nothing to admire in nature but his weed—his plant—his Picciola; and, as if to justify his folly by analogy, dived into the vast stores of his memory for a precedent. [Illustration]