The human mind naturally delights in the discovery of truth; and even when perverted by the constant operations of prevailing errors, a glimpse of the Real comes upon it like the smile of daylight to the sorrowing captive of some dark prison. The Psychean labours to try man’s soul, and exalt it, are the search for truth beneath the mysteries which surround creation,--to gather amaranths, shining with the hues of heaven, from plains upon which hang, dark and heavy, the mists of earth. The poet may pay the debt of nature,--the philosopher may return to the bosom of our common mother,--even their names fade in the passage of time, like planets blotted out of heaven but the truths they have revealed to man burn on for ever with unextinguishable brightness. Truth cannot die; it passes from mind to mind, imparting light in its progress, and constantly renewing its own brightness during its diffusion. The True is the Beautiful; and the truths revealed to the mind render us capable of perceiving new beauties on the earth. The gladness of truth is like the ringing voice of a joyous child, and the most remote recesses echo with the cheerful sound. To be for ever true is the Science of Poetry,--the revelation of truth is the Poetry of Science. Man, a creation endued with mighty faculties, but a mystery to himself, stands in the midst of a wonderful world, and an infinite variety of phenomena arise around him in strange form and magical disposition, like the phantasma of a restless night. The solid rock obeys a power which brings its congeries of atoms into a thousand shapes, each one geometrically perfect. Its vegetable covering, in obedience to some external excitation, developes itself in a curious diversity of forms, from the exquisitely graceful to the singularly grotesque, and exhibits properties still more varied and opposed. The animal organism quickened by higher impulses,--powers working within, and modifying the influence of the external forces,--presents, from the Monad to the Mammoth, and through every phase of being up to Man, a yet more wonderful series of combinations, and features still more strangely contrasted. Lifting our searching gaze into the measureless space beyond our earth, we find planet bound to planet, and system chained to system, all impelled by a universal force to roll in regularity and order around a common centre. The pendulations of the remotest star are communicated through the unseen bond; and our rocking world obeys the mysterious impulse throughout all those forces which regulate the inorganic combinations of this earth, and unto which its organic creation is irresistibly compelled to bow.