Human life has evidently desires that human life can never satisfy. What is the remedy for this evil? Apparently, none is possible. The very terms seem to involve a hopeless contradiction. It is indeed said, that faith in God helps us out of the difficulty, and raises man above himself. But when I ask my teacher what he means by the Deity, I receive either no answer or worse than none. One says, the Creator of all things. But this tells me nothing of the kind of Being who created all. The rat that lurks in the crannies of a castle, and is hunted and laid wait for daily, learns little to gratify its soul if told that the architect of the castle formed the ratholes no less than the rat-traps, and even took pains to stock them with his progenitors. Another talks to me of the Life and Ground of all things. But this gives me scanty help; for of all things I best know myself. It is, therefore, by looking within that I can find the most intelligible specimen and example of that All of which I am referred to the Cause and the Vital Principle. From this quarter, then,-namely, my own consciousness of myself,-I must derive my view of the character of the Primordial Power. Now, it is my own consciousness which is sick, suffering, plague-stricken; and it is from its miseries that I am directed to take refuge in that Divine Idea which is yet so plainly shown to be itself wounded with the same weapon and infected by the same poison. It is the very malady and desperation of all within me which leads me to seek help from something outward. If that Outward be but a repetition of the Interior Existence, magnified in the concave mirror of the Universe, all its distortions and scars, its blood and tears and steel-spiked crown, are also reflected and enlarged there. If, again, I am sent to the Bible, I see, indeed, clearly enough that what I will not call the Jupiter of that Iliad, but the Fate of that high Hebrew Tragedy, would condemn and punish me for not being other than I am. But how I shall become other, how be fashioned by that standard, seems to me as vain an enquiry as how the flying-fish can change itself into the dolphin which pursues it, and so find refuge in the waters. Finally, miracles are no evidence to him who has no clear conception of the Being they are said to

proceed from; and even if they were, they would go to establish a system which, from the inconformity of my mind to its principles, leaves me an outcast or makes me a victim.

I cannot recognise myself or my experience of life in the Sacred Records. When I read them I find myself travelling in an enchanted region that has almost nothing in common with my accustomed country. There is little in it that joins on to any thing pre-existent in me. I acknowledge, indeed, here a rich and profuse beauty, as in fairy pictures; there, a dreary awful power, as in Druidical or Egyptian remains; wonders, again, as unprepared and incoherent as those of dreams; lastly, gushes of human feeling and strains of thought which really seem to belong to the same nature as mine, but which stand in no close or necessary relation to the loftier, stran. ger, more oracular portions. I can as little enter into the old Hebrew's views of divine and human things as he, could he now revive, would comprehend my feelings as to nature, art, and man. His world is, indeed, a land of marvels, many of them lovely and many expressive, but all shut up within a circuit of huge walls. It seems to me the chief of all confounding paradoxes that so many millions of men, in times and modes so different from these, should fancy the grey and thundering cloud of that old Eastern Theocracy can remain built up like a Cyclopian wall in our freer calmer sky.

In the family I live in there is no one who has the smallest notion that my opinions differ at all from their own and from those of the clergyman of the parish.

There is no one of them who could ever be brought to understand the least portion of my views. Now if, as I cannot but suppose, there

are many other instances of the same entire misconception as to the characters and thoughts of those we live with daily, what a world of secret and unguessed life must be concealed within that which is palpable and commonplace! How many hidden-treasure chambers, forgotten graves, buried habitations, and inurned yet beating hearts, must lie under the soil which the feet of busy men hourly and so heedlessly travel over! Perhaps the world would gain were it to unknow

all it knows, provided it could also learn all it does not know. The common, the public, the familiar, is the product of chance, interest, indifference, fraud. The hidden and personal, that which he who possesses it shrinks from casting into the open mud-pool of society, is the growth of inward feeling and reflection, the winnings of earnest endeavour. We wrap up and conceal the sacred spoils that are stained with the dear blood we have shed in gaining them; but we hawk in open baskets the pebbles, shells, and weeds, which all may gather by the highwayside, or on the bare and trodden sand of the frequented bay. The rush and throng of life are for ever driving back into cells and nooks whatever would come forth of independent, genuine, peculiar. The light, easy, empty, popular, is received into the kindred element, is borne along with and swells the mass. Thus, probably, what each successive generation has added to the world's possessions is but the husks and scum of its existence; while whatever has been truly noble and severe was sunk and lost with or before its creators. Could the figures in the apparent picture of his tory be suddenly effaced, and the glass they are painted on be made transparent, so as to show the reality it now hides, how completely might our views of all things and ourselves be reversed and transmuted! We should see, perhaps, in many a family of those poor barbarians whom Cæsar slaughtered by myriads, more dignity, sensibility, genuine sense of nature and power, than in the accomplished, radiant emperor. Knowing how in myself what is deep, arduous, and high-minded shrinks from view, and all that is imitative, hollow, selfish, and sequacious lies on the surface, or rather forms it, may I not believe that the like is true of the world and all its history?

To-day is likely to be a memorable one for me. I was wandering some miles from the house while my pupil was gone on a pleasure party with the family in another direction. At last I came out of a lane upon a farmhouse with a little garden in front of it, in which a young woman was tying up the flowers. She had a singularly soft and quiet manner of moving, such as indicated a quiet and harmonious life, and gave her more the air of a

lady than most ladies that I have seen. I went up to speak to her, and asked where I was, and what would be my shortest way back, when I saw her face more distinctly, her mild features, and clear blue eyes. She answered me in a low sweet voice, gravely but pleasantly, when an old man came out of the house, whom I found to be her father, and whom I remembered to have seen two or three times at my employer's, the squire's, where he had come on justice business as an overseer of the poor. I recollected that his name was Wilson; and on speaking to him and saying where I lived, he asked me in. The daughter had gone before, and I willingly agreed. The family and the house have alike an appearance of simplicity and peace at once strange and delightful to me. When I think of the restless pretensions and the discontent of those I live among, the contrast becomes very striking. I spent a quarter of an hour in the house, and when I was returning through the woods and fields the figure of Elizabeth seemed always flitting before me, yet with her face turned towards mine, and with her bright and gentle eyes and calm smile looking at me from between the trees and above the hedge-rows. I could not walk steadily, but jumped and ran, and every now and then stood still, the more clearly to recall her image. I, who seldom am able to pray, caught myself exclaiming,-" O God! hast thou at last sent me a being whom I may love, and who may one day love me?"

I have now seen Elizabeth many times. Her whole life and culture have had but the two elements, the domestic and the Biblical. Yet to how complete and melodious, nay, sometimes how high and lyrical, a being has she attained! She knows, indeed, little; but she has the most open, the freshest, and the truest sense for whatever is natural and worthy. While with her, and thinking no longer of speculations or of myself, I feel as if I had thrown off a stiff and heavy armour which I had worn for years, and been clad of a sudden in soft and lucid silken robes. Oh, how divine is the blessedness of love! It leaves me no fears and regrets. I feel that life is indeed a capacity for joy, and is nothing else. All besides is but the pain

and struggle through which that capacity is unfolded. She, without designing it, has opened my heart to see and feel goodness and beauty in every thing around me. Nay, strangest of all, when with her I read the Bible, and when I see how its morality and devotion and multitudinous imagery have passed into and become portions of her heart, I seem to perceive that the Deity may be beheld immediately and acknowledged, as we discern and own what is excellent in a human being, and should feel it a villany to ask how we can prove such and such a pure and heroic man not to be a mere cheat and quack. Much, indeed, is still dark; but I can now conceive it to be transitory and hopeful darkness, for what once was darkest of all, namely, my own being and affections, are now bright and benignant. I now know that to believe is nobler than to theorise, and to act more profitable than to murmur. I dare not complain of the seemingly inexplicable contradictions of Existence, while I am not guiding my own in the path which

evidently opens before me. I cannot, indeed, see its termination, but I do see the portion nearest to me, which must, at all events, be first travelled; and as I do not see the end, I know not but that it may issue in the solution of all my difficulties. There is a road of action guiding me I know not precisely whither; and there must be somewhere, though I know not precisely where, an outlet from the labyrinth of speculation. One, therefore, of these mysteries may turn out to be the solution of the other. Nay, if all Life be not a hopeless, planless Chaos, I dare affirm that so it must be. And that such and so darkly bewildered is not our mortal state, my hopes, my sympathies, my exulting joy, my sense of liberation, in the love of Elizabeth, are to me abundant proof. The God of the Bible and the God of the Universe, I now divine afar off, may be known as One. But I am sure that to know Him at all, except by guess, I must resolve that He shall practically be my God.

3.