"We know nothing, or next to nothing of the substance or structure of our souls, so cannot account for those seeming caprices in them, that one should be particularly pleased with this thing, or struck with that, which, on minds of a different cast, makes no extraordinary impression. I have some favorite flowers in spring, among which are the mountain daisy, the harebell, the foxglove, the wild brier rose, the budding birch, and the hoary hawthorn, that I view and hang over with particular delight. I never heard the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a summer noon, or the wild, mixing cadence of a troop of gray plover in an autumnal morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the enthusiasm of devotion or poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, which like the Æolian harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod? I own myself partial to such proofs of those awful and important realities--a God that made all things--man's immaterial and immortal nature--and a world of weal or woe beyond death and the grave." A fit comment on this and other passages of similar import in his letters is the following affecting poem, entitled "A Prayer in the Prospect of Death." It seems to us to utter the deep throbbings of the poet's spirit: "Why am I loth to leave this earthly scene? Have I so found it full of pleasing charms? Some drops of joy, with draughts of ill between; Some gleams of sunshine 'mid renewing storms; Is it departing pangs my soul alarms? Or death's unlovely, dreary, dark abode? For guilt, for guilt, my terrors are in arms; I tremble to approach an angry God, And justly smart beneath his sin avenging rod. Fain would I say, 'forgive my foul offence!' Fain promise never more to disobey; But should my Author health again dispense, Again I might desert fair virtue's way; Again in folly's path might go astray; Again exalt the brute and sink the man. Then how should I for heavenly mercy pray; Who act so counter heavenly mercy's plan, Who sin so oft have mourn'd, yet to temptation ran? O thou great Governor of all below, If I may dare a lifted eye to Thee, Thy nod can make the tempest cease to blow, Or still the tumult of the raging sea; With that controling power assist ev'n me, Those headlong furious passions to confine, For all unfit I feel my powers to be, To rule their torrent in the allowed line; O aid me with thy help, Omnipotence Divine!"