"I want to know---whence I came; whither I am going. Whether there be, in truth, as so many say there is, a God,--a tremendous personality, to whose infinite faculties the 'great' and the 'little' (as we call them) equally vanish,--whose universal presence fills all space, in any point of which he exists entire in the amplitude of all his infinite attributes,--whose universal government extends even to me, and my fellow-atoms, called men,--within whose sheltering embrace even I am not too mean for protection;--whether, if there be such a being, he is truly infinite; or whether this vast machine of the universe may not have developed tendencies or involved consequences which eluded his forethought, and are now beyond even his control; --whether, for this reason, or for some other necessity, such infinite sorrows have been permitted to invade it;--whether, above all, He be propitious or offended with a world in which I feel too surely, in the profound and various misery of man, that his aspects are not all benignant;--how, if he be offended, he is to be reconciled;--whether he is at all accessible, or one to whom the pleasures and the sufferings of the poor child of dust are equally subjects of horrible indifference;--whether, if such Omnipotent Being created the world, he has now abandoned it to be the sport of chance, and I am thus an orphan in the universe;--whether this 'universal frame' be indeed without a mind, and we are, in fact, the only forms of conscious existence; --whether, as the Pantheist declares, the universe itself be God,-- ever making, never made,--the product of an evolution of an infinite series of 'antecedents' and 'consequents'; a God of which--for I cannot say of whom--you and I are bits; perishable fragments of a Divinity, itself imperishable only because there will always be bits of it to perish;--whether, even upon some such supposition, this conscious existence of ours is to be renewed; and, if under what conditions; or whether, when we have finished our little day, no other dawn is to break upon our night;--whether the vale, vale in eternum vale, is really the proper utterance of a breaking heart as it closes the sepulchre on the object of its love." His voice faltered; and I was confirmed in my suspicions, that some deep, secret sorrow had had to do with his morbid state of mind. In a moment, he resumed:--