THE IDEAL INVISIBLE WORLD. 3 



best feelings of the heart are blunted and perverted by 

 the turmoil and cares of the world, has not felt an in- 

 tense desire to remove the veil that shrouds from our 

 senses the invisible creation, and hold converse with 

 being's of a hiMier order than ourselves ? Who has not 

 experienced that yearning after the " Desert," and the 

 " ministering Spirit," so finely expressed by Lord Byron, 

 in a stanza of inimitable beauty and pathos ? 



Oh ! that the Desert were my dwelling-place, 

 With one fair Spirit for my minister, 

 That I might all forget the human race, 

 And, hating no one, love but only her ! 

 Ye Elements ! — in whose ennobling stir 

 I feel myself exalted — Can ye not 

 Accord me such a being ? Do I err 

 In deeming such inhabit many a spot ? 

 Though with them to convei se can rarely be our lot. 



Childe Harold, Canto IV. 



And in after years, in those hours when, escaping 

 from the vexations and excitements of active life, we 

 fly for solace to the realms of fiction, and, giving our- 

 selves up to the magic page of Shakespear, of Scott, 

 or of Bulwer, forget for a wliile our anxieties and our 

 sorrows, the visions of our early days will sometimes 

 steal over us, we resign ourselves to the illusion, and 

 once more the streams, the forests, and the air teem 



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