436 MEMOIR OF GEORGE WILSON. CHAP. X. 



house in Philadelphia, of which we have no return. It has been 

 spoken of as " a hymn of the finest utterance and fancy the 

 white light of science diffracted through the crystalline prism 

 of his mind into the coloured glories of the spectrum; truth 

 dressed in the iridescent hues of the rainbow, and not the less 

 but all the more true." " He tries with that affectionate spirit, that 

 love of the good and the great, that reverential adoration of God's 

 wondrous works, which have made Dr. George Wilson's name 

 a pleasant sound in the ears of all who know him, to make his 

 readers feel with himself an intense appreciation of those bless- 

 ings in which he revels, who knows how to make his soul and 

 his senses work in a wise harmony." We believe this book to 

 have become one of the great cords of love that knit George 

 Wilson so closely to the hearts of thousands. To heap up, as 

 might easily be done, the tokens of admiration lavished on it, 

 seems superfluous; it needs them not. Let us rather refresh 

 ourselves with a few of its pictures : 



" The ivory palace of the skull, which is the central abode of 

 the soul, although it dwells in the whole body, opens to the 

 outer world four gateways, by which its influences may enter ; 

 and a fifth, whose alleys are innumerable, unfolds its thousand 

 doors on the surface of every limb. These gateways, which we 

 otherwise name the Organs of the Senses, and call in our mother 

 speech the Eye, the Ear, the Nose, the Mouth, and the Skin, are 

 instruments by which we see, and hear, and smell, and taste, and 

 touch : at once loopholes through which the spirit gazes out upon 

 the world, and the world gazes in upon the spirit; porches 

 which the longing, unsatisfied soul would often gladly make 

 wider, that beautiful material nature might come into it more 

 fully and freely ; and fenced doors, which the sated and dis- 

 satisfied spirit would, if it had the power, often shut and bar 

 altogether. . . . 



" Its beauty [the eye] is, perhaps, most apparent in the eye of 

 an infant, which, if you please, we shall suppose not dead, but only 

 asleep, with its eyes wide open. How large and round they are ! 

 how pure and pearly the white is, with but one blue vein or two 

 marbling its surface ; how beautiful the rainbow ring, opening 

 its mottled circle wide to the light ! How sharply defined the 



