92 HANNAH DYER. 



perpetual monotony. Spontaneity and freewill are terms signifi- 

 cant of nothing ; he lives and moves with no reference to others ; 

 the beastial degeneration of a thinking being into a living automa- 

 ton. 



" A Cowslip on a river's brim 

 A yellow Cowslip is to him, 

 And nothing more." 



Everything is ''nothing more" than the mere presence of an exist- 

 ing object. The green earth or the foaming ocean possess no beau- 

 ty nor grandeur, but are the commonplace objects of his senses ; 

 and, worse than all, there is no redemption, since he is insensible to 

 the loss. But whence could spring so horrible a malediction ? — 

 from the disruption of the continuity of his life. Infancy, boy- 

 hood, youth, and manhood, succeeded each other, not as nature or- 

 dained, by an insensible subsidence, each change succeeding unper- 

 ceivably in their gradual progression, but divided from each other 

 by habits enforced with every period ; infancy with its fine impres- 

 sions, boyhood with its happy hopes and fancies, youth with its sus- 

 ceptibilities and warm and wuld desires, were successively flung 

 aside, as a dried leaf from the stem that nourished it. There is no 

 memory of the past, no hope for the future. — We owe our intellec- 

 tual affluence to the successively perpetuated impressions of boyhood ; 

 the root is in infancy — the flower that '' spirits odorous breathes," 

 buds and blossoms in manhood. The wants of childhood become 

 the hopes of youth and the ambition of age ; the difference is only 

 in their extension. It is only when the stages of life are bound to- 

 gether by these insensible intercommunions, until the first and 

 second childhood, like a circle, approximate in their impressions — 

 an emblem of that eternity of which existence is thus a type — that 

 we become regenerated spirits " like unto a little child ;" when the 

 memory of our childhood brings tears into the eye of age, and reci- 

 procates us with ourselves by a perfect harmony. 



" My heart leaps up when I behold 



A rainbow in the sky : 

 So was it when my life began ; 

 So be it now I am a Man ; 

 So be it when I shall grow old, 



Or let me die ! 

 The Child is Father of the Man ; 

 And I would wish my days to be 

 Bound each 1o each hy natural pielif." 



