To look upwards from any existence, material or immaterial, to its _design_, is, perhaps, the most direct, and the most unerring method of attaining a just notion of the nature of the existence itself. Nor is the principle at fault when we turn our eyes from Nature even to Nature's God. We find certain faculties implanted within us, and arrive at a more plausible conception of the character and attributes of those faculties, by considering, with what finite judgment we possess, the _intention_ of the Deity in so implanting them within us, than by any actual investigation of their powers, or any speculative deductions from their visible and material effects. Thus, for example, we discover in all men a disposition to look with reverence upon {328} superiority, whether real or supposititious. In some, this disposition is to be recognized with difficulty, and, in very peculiar cases, we are occasionally even led to doubt its existence altogether, until circumstances beyond the common routine bring it accidentally into development. In others again it forms a prominent and distinctive feature of character, and is rendered palpably evident in its excesses. But in all human beings it is, in a greater or less degree, finally perceptible. It has been, therefore, justly considered a primitive sentiment. Phrenologists call it Veneration. It is, indeed, the instinct given to man by God as security for his own worship. And although, preserving its nature, it becomes perverted from its principal purpose, and although, swerving from that purpose, it serves to modify the relations of human society--the relations of father and child, of master and slave, of the ruler and the ruled--its primitive essence is nevertheless the same, and by a reference to primal causes, may at any moment be determined. Very nearly akin to this feeling, and liable to the same analysis, is the Faculty of Ideality--which is the sentiment of Poesy. This sentiment is the sense of the beautiful, of the sublime, and of the mystical.[3] Thence spring immediately admiration of the fair flowers, the fairer forests, the bright valleys and rivers and mountains of the Earth--and love of the gleaming stars and other burning glories of Heaven--and, mingled up inextricably with this love and this admiration of Heaven and of Earth, the unconquerable desire--_to know_. Poesy is the sentiment of Intellectual Happiness here, and the Hope of a higher Intellectual Happiness hereafter.[4] Imagination is its Soul.[5] With the _passions_ of mankind--although it may modify them greatly--although it may exalt, or inflame, or purify, or control them--it would require little ingenuity to prove that it has no inevitable, and indeed no necessary co-existence. We have hitherto spoken of Poetry in the abstract: we come now to speak of it in its every-day acceptation--that is to say, of the practical result arising from the sentiment we have considered.