344 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
and youth into the holier calms of full contentment, had now 
become so morbidly distorted that this solitude was terrible, 
unless filled with the action and excitement of danger. My 
late adventure, from the still farther confusion in which it 
involved my spiritual and mental sense, proved only the 
incentive to yet more blind and headlong plunges, into—l 
knew and cared not what—desperate extremes of adventure. 
I hurriedly parted with my friend © , determined to 
push on to the uttermost verge of settlement, or even beyond 
if might be! . 
Now, by way of parenthesis, as to this novel metaphysics, 
upon an exposition of which I am about to enter, I would say, 
if there be sermons in stones, and the minnow-rippled, silvery- 
gabbling brooks be all oracular, and the mute trees yet panto- 
mime of homilies,—not to speak of the obstreperous tongue, 
nimble-stroked, of “cross, quick lightning,’’ which, “in the 
dead vast, and middle of the night” doth fright us with its 
ethics,—if, I say, these have, every one, high teachings of 
their own, why may there not be more in the metaphysics 
of bear-hunting than has been dreamed of in any fire-side 
philosophy ? 
I am human enough to love this linking of the invisible 
with forms; this association with the material gives it to the 
palpable. Every thought of mirth, or vision of. delight, is 
ours forever, when, clothed in fit habiliments, we have given 
it “a local habitation and a name.” 
«These are the adept’s doctrines; every element 
Is peopled with its separate race of spirits; 
The airy sylph on the blue ether floats, 
Deep in the earthy caverns skulks the gnome, 
The sea-green Naiad skims the ocean billow, 
And the fierce fire is yet a friendly home 
To its peculiar sprite, the Salamander !” 
Now, though I have no special dealing at present with the 
Sylpb, Naiad, Gnome, or Salamander, I would submit whether 
