of being, in that terrific fiat out of which the worlds sprang forth, to roll convulsively onward and evermore onward, till they can drop back into rest and nothingness--in this all contradictions and contrarieties are mixt up and confounded, to petrify into an indissoluble curse." Edward was silent at first for a while: then not without emotion he spake the following words: "I cannot understand what you say except in part; for the bent of your thoughts and feelings I am an utter stranger to. Whatever sorrows I have undergone, whatever unprofitable or cheerless meditations I have indulged in, still I have never strayed into these deserts, which lie, it would seem, at the horizon of all such as abandon themselves with too passionate intensity to captious inquiries. I have heard and read of strong minds, who in the recklessness of passion, or in the extravagancies of love, strove to burst the bolts of nature and of life, in order to become one with the universe and to possess it. Despair, self-loathing, hatred of God, have often been the doom and the unhappy lot of men thus under the mastery of their impulses. We feel no doubt that reason is not absolutely sufficient to reveal all that we wish to understand, to reconcile all that we wish to see in harmony with the workings of the deity. But it may be dangerous to seek for help in the regions of our feelings and imagination, to give ear to our visionary forebodings. They try to set up their own supremacy, and may easily fall out with reason, though at the outset they seem to uphold her. If they gain their aim, and this noble mediatorial power, which seated in the centre of all our spiritual powers, irradiating and swaying them, first converts them into true powers, is overthrown and cast into chains by them, then each of our higher impulses begets a giant as its son, that will war against God. For doubt, wit, unbelief, and scoffing are not the only faculties that fight against God: our imagination, our feelings, our enthusiasm do the same, though at first they seem to supply faith with so safe and mysterious an asylum. Consequently, my dear, my honoured friend, since our life is surrounded on all sides by these dizzying precipices, and every path, whatever course it takes, leads to them, what remains for us to do, except to trust with a certain kind of light-heartedness, which perhaps is also one among the noblest powers of our nature, with cheerfulness, gaiety, and humility, in the existence and the love of that infinite inexhaustible love, of that supreme wisdom, which puts on every shape, and can weave into its woof even what to us seems worthless and incongruous? so as to bear our life safely and easily, to take pleasure in our task-work, and to be happy, which we cannot else be, in the midst of affluence itself, making others happy as far as we are able. Is not this too piety and religion? I for my part have never met with them under any other form."