60 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



much for algebra, and chemistry, and the affairs of the household, and 

 too little for that of the church ; nay, every household should become 

 a church, where the pervading spirit of all loveliness may sit enshrined, 

 and "where her votaries may kneel with fervent hearts to worship and 

 offer sacrifice. It is our consuming folly to view all things in the 

 cold light of the intellect, and to judge by the acquisition of facts, 

 rather than by the enlargement of the highest sentiments. Are facts 

 so necessary then ? Have you exhausted all your previous stock? 

 Or do you sit brooding there for some expected truth which shall show 

 you the hollowness of your ways, but which while you sit there, and 

 shut your ears to the beseechings of the soul shall never come, and 

 you shall die at last a beggar. The sovereignty of the intellect has 

 dwindled into cant, as much soul as you can muster avails ; maugre 

 that, all is barrenness and ashes. Events strengthen not the hope, 

 for no length of time will ever ripen the contents of an empty barrel. 

 If the intellect is our highest faculty, how comes it that so many of 

 those who have been so highly endowed with this inheritance, have 

 only died at last covered with shame at the perverted nature of their 

 lives ? — who, while stalking like petty gods among men, and trans- 

 cending by the giant powers of their minds, have yet left a blight and 

 pestilence in their path, as venomous reptiles leave their slimy tracks 

 behind them. The names of Alexander, Pericles, Aspasia, Cataline, 

 Alcibiades, Mirabeau, and Napoleon, only suggest a thousand more 

 which might be quoted. And much to be deplored are the effects of 

 our systems of trade, commerce, and education, in checking the growth 

 of the best sentiments of our nature. The slow and steady calculations 

 of gain and loss are appended like badges of charity to every effort 

 which the pure soul would make to rescue some relic of itself from 

 the wreck and destruction in which it finds itself immersed, and 

 which threaten almost to strike God from the world. The influence 

 of the senses is to circumscribe all things, and make the walls of 

 space and time look solid and real, and to surround us with a world 

 of insanity and corruption ; but the moment we suffer the soul to 

 speak we become advertized of the great possibilities of our being, and 

 a heaven of truth opens before us, in which we may bathe as in an 

 ocean which has neither let nor boimd, and even to us, the attributes 

 of God become possible. " The moment we indulge our affections, 

 the earth is metamorphosed ; there is no winter and no night ; all 

 tragedies, all enmci vanish — all duties even ; nothing fills the proceed- 



