your endeavor to convince, that insult is more of an offence than an argument; indeed, it is only used when argument is exhausted. The composing of an epic poem is held to be the highest achievement of the human mind. Ideality, or imagination, is the means used in the performance of the work. Ideality is the inspiration of religion, and without it religion would simply be a form of law, to be broken like other laws, and to be vindicated by penalties and processes similar to those imposed and employed in the vindication and substantiation of any other law. The ecclesiastical synonym for ideality is faith. If ideality be the source of the highest results of intellectual effort, and of religious belief, who can venture to fabricate a chain with which to bind and circumscribe its flights? If man in power, for the supposed benefit of the man out of power, does so, it is merely the result of policy, or passion, or human prejudice, or selfishness; and no man that ever lived, from the Pope of Rome to the backwood preacher, and from the preacher to the ethical moralist, has had that right inherent in his particular nature, to tax as a royalty the patent of the human mind to the grand prerogative of thought. Canute, the king, tried an experiment of mastery with the tide. What other despot of school theory will make the same effort with the tidings of the brain of man, hoping for better success than the Danish fool? If there be such, so sure as the first known madman of the Hamlet race was driven from the beech, will the other be overwhelmed by the resistless force of that great wave of intelligence which has already grappled with the lightning, and taught it the babel language by which man expresses his endless wants. Man, when he seizes upon the great faculties of electricity, does not stultify himself by establishing a limit to its capacity. At first it was a rod upon a chimney that drew a spark from the thunder-storm; then the galvanic battery, to draw paralysis from limbs; then the wire from city to city; and now it passes beneath the throbbing bosom of the sea, and whispers the price of stocks or the policy of cabinets into the ear of a man who sits at his table, like a musician at his piano, taking out of the thunderbolts of Jove a language and a spirit that ignorance would deny the possibility of being there. And what more will be accomplished by electricity? We stand upon the threshold of its domain, enlightened by flashes that invite and illumine to farther experiments. Doubt is the genius of discovery, but, at present, with regard to the supernatural, there is nothing proved except what we believe; otherwise, the world would have but one creed. XVII. MANIFESTATIONS.