FACULTIES OF THE MIND. 



403 



And oft to thee lie lifts his eye, 

 Mild empress of the spaiigled sky ! 

 And thanks thy dewy beams that guide 

 His footsteps to his clay-cold bride. 

 And oft he asks tlie starry train 

 That circle round thy silver reign, 

 By which her parting spirit pass'd. 

 And where slie stay'd her fliirht at last. 

 He asks — and thither would he go — 

 For what has nature now below 1 



Thus far the mind has imqiiestionably evinced little or no control ; and I 

 bring forward these descriptions as instances of its snbjug-ation. But even 

 -here, in one of the severest trials with which mankind can be visited, the 

 mind gradually finds the means of recovering its ascendency ; the passions 

 by degrees become tranquillized, and in their turn subdued; the heart 

 softened, the judgment corrected and fortified, and the reason set at liberty 

 for reflection. The pale suff'erer perceives, at length, that happiness, to be 

 genuine, must be neither violent nor transitory ; that its foundation must be 

 permanent, and its nature unalloyed. He yields himself to this train of con- 

 templation ; and the mind, now fully reinstated in its government, indulges a 

 sober and rational grief, and arrives at a sober and rational conclusion. It 

 determines that earth has no such happiness to offer him ; it may perhaps 

 lead him farther, and prompt him to seek it in a sublimer source. 



This description I have drawn from the natural passions of the human heart 

 — passions that, in a greater or less degree, are common to all countries and 

 ages ; but there are passions of which uncultivated nature knows nothing, 

 which are the baneful otfspring of a morbid civilization and immoral habits, 

 and which possess, if possible, a still more tyrannical control over the judg- 

 ment than any that nature herself has implanted within it. Such is the pas- 

 sion for GAMBLING, which has often, even in the sobriety of our own climate, 

 maddened the brain of men who, but for this, had been wwthy members of 

 society, and plunged them into the foulest vices, and at length, into the deadly 

 gulf of suicide. One of the best pictures of the heart-rending despair of such 

 a wretch, just betbre the perpetration of this horrible crime, is to be found in 

 the description of Beverly in " The Gamester,'''' who is thus painted to the life, 

 in the inevitable ruin into which he was thrown after having staked the last 

 resource and final hope of his wife and family on one unfortunate and fatal 

 hazard : — 



" When all was lost, he fixed his eyes upon the ground, and stood some 

 time with folded arms, stupid and motionless ; then, snatching his sword that 

 hung against the wainscot, he sat him down, and with a look of fixed atten- 

 tion drew figures on the floor. At last, he started up ; looked wild, and 

 trembled ; and, like a woman seized with her sex's fits, laughed out aloud, 

 while the tears trickled down his face. So he left the room." 



Yet, even here, under the fell sway of this accursed incantation, we are 

 not without examples of its being occasionally broken through, audits deadly 

 fetters shaken off* by the virtuous resolution of a mind determined to prove 

 its independence, and to act according to the dictates of its better judgment. 

 As an example of which, among many others, I may refer to the conduct of 

 one of the first statesmen of our own country and our own age ; — a states- 

 man, whose name will ever be dear to Britain, on various accounts, but chiefly, 

 perhaps, since under his administration, she set the glorious example to the 

 world of abolishing the slave-trade. In early life it is well known that Mr. 

 Fox was irresistibly addicted to this intoxicating passion ; and it is also 

 equally known, that in his maturer life, he tore himself from the farther 

 prosecution of it, by a courageous determination from which he never de- 

 parted. 



It appears obvious, then, that the mind both can and ought to maintain a 

 general mastery over all its faculties ; and is able, at all times, except in ex- 

 treme cases, to furnish itself with motives. And hence, though it \s perfectly 

 true that it cannot will, or, in other words, cannot choose or refuse without a 

 motive, and to this extent is under a necessity, yet the origination or change 



(";c8 



