things, instead of being compelled to shut our eyes to what we cannot help, we still are the dupes of the feeling of the moment, and prefer amusing ourselves with fair appearances to securing more solid benefits by a sacrifice of Imagination and stubborn Will to Truth. The blindness of passion to the most obvious and well-known consequences is deplorable. There seems to be a particular fatality in this respect. Because a thing is in our power _till_ we have committed ourselves, we appear to dally, to trifle with, to make light of it, and to think it will still be in our power _after_ we have committed ourselves. Strange perversion of the reasoning faculties, which is little short of madness, and which yet is one of the constant and practical sophisms of human life! It is as if one should say--I am in no danger from a tremendous machine unless I touch such a spring and therefore I will approach it, I will play with the danger, I will laugh at it, and at last in pure sport and wantonness of heart, from my sense of previous security, I _will_ touch it--and _there's an end_. While the thing remains in contemplation, we may be said to stand safe and smiling on the brink: as soon as we proceed to action we are drawn into the vortex of passion and hurried to our destruction. A person taken up with some one purpose or passion is intent only upon that: he drives out the thought of everything but its gratification: in the pursuit of that he is blind to consequences: his first object being attained, they all at once, and as if by magic, rush upon his mind. The engine recoils, he is caught in his own snare. A servant girl, for some pique, or for an angry word, determines to poison her mistress. She knows beforehand (just as well as she does afterwards) that it is at least a hundred chances to one she will be hanged if she succeeds, yet this has no more effect upon her than if she had never heard of any such matter. The only idea that occupies her mind and hardens it against every other, is that of the affront she has received, and the desire of revenge; she broods over it; she meditates the mode, she is haunted with her scheme night and day; it works like poison; it grows into a madness, and she can have no peace till it is accomplished and _off her mind_; but the moment this is the case, and her passion is assuaged, fear takes place of hatred, the slightest suspicion alarms her with the certainty of her fate, from which she before wilfully averted her thoughts; she runs wildly from the officers before they know anything of the matter; the gallows stares her in the face, and if none else accuses her, so full is she of her danger and her guilt, that she probably betrays herself. She at first would see no consequences to result from her crime but the getting rid of a present uneasiness; she now sees the very worst. The whole seems to depend on the turn given to the imagination, on our immediate disposition to attend to this or that view of the subject,