passions, this love immediately passes over to and loses itself in the ordinary realities of life, then is it no genuine manifestation of the heavenly feeling, but a mere earthly and sensual longing. But when it survives the youthful ebullition of the feelings, when it does but become deeper and more intense by time, when it is satisfied with no joys, and stifled by no sorrows of earth--when, from the midst of the struggles of life, and the pressure of the world, it turns, like a light-seeing eye upon the storm-tossed waves of the ocean of time, to the heaven of heavens, watching to discover there some star of eternal hope--then is it that true and genuine longing, which, directing itself to the divine, is itself also of a celestial origin. Out of this root springs almost every thing that is intellectually beautiful and great--even the love of scientific certainty itself, and of a profound knowledge of life and nature. Philosophy, indeed, has no other source, and we might in this respect call it, with much propriety, the doctrine or the science of longing. But even that youthful longing, already noticed, is oftentimes a genuine, or, at least, the first foundation of the higher and truer species, although, unlike the latter, it is as yet neither purely evolved nor refined by the course of time. One general remark remains to be added. This beautiful longing of youth, a fruitful fancy, and a loving soul, are the best and most precious gifts of benignant nature, that dispenses with so liberal a hand, or, rather, not of nature, but of that wonderful Intelligence that presides in and over it. They form, as it were, a fair garden of hidden life within man. But as the first man was placed in the garden of Eden, not merely for his idle enjoyment, but, as it is expressly stated, “to dress it and to keep it,” so here also, when this law of duty is neglected, the inmost heart of the most eminent characters and of the most richly-endowed natures becomes, as it were, a Paradise run wild and waste.