f swiftness, the sword of sharpness, the power of subduing the
elements, of using the secret virtues of minerals, of understanding
the voices of birds, are the obscure efforts of the mind in a right
direction. The preternatural prowess of the hero, the gift of perpetual
youth, and the like, are alike the endeavour of the human spirit "to
bend the shows of things to the desires of the mind."

In Perceforest and Amadis de Gaul a garland and a rose bloom on the head
of her who is faithful, and fade on the brow of the inconstant. In the
story of the Boy and the Mantle even a mature reader may be surprised
with a glow of virtuous pleasure at the triumph of the gentle Venelas;
and indeed all the postulates of elfin annals,--that the fairies do not
like to be named; that their gifts are capricious and not to be trusted;
that who seeks a treasure must not speak; and the like,--I find true in
Concord, however they might be in Cornwall or Bretagne.

Is it otherwise in the newest romance? I read the Bride of Lammermoor.
Sir William Ashton is a mask for a vulgar temptation, Ravenswood Castle
a fine name for proud poverty, and the foreign mission of state only a
Bunyan disguise for honest industry. We may all shoot a wild bull that
would toss the good and beautiful, by fighting down the unjust and
sensual. Lucy Ashton is another name for fidelity, which is always
beautiful and always liable to calamity in this world.

But along with the civil and metaphysical history of man, another
history goes daily forward,--that of the external world,--in which he is
not less strictly implicated. He is the compend of time; he is also
the correlative of nature. His power consists in the multitude of his
affinities, in the fact that his life is intertwined with the whole
chain of organic and inorganic being. In old Rome the public roads
beginning at the Forum proceeded north, south, east, west, to the centre
of every province of the empire, making each market-town of Persia,
Spain and Britain pervious to the soldiers of the capital: so out of
the human heart go as it were highways to the heart of every object in
nature, to reduce it under the dominion of man. A man is a bundle of
relations, a knot of roots, whose flower and fruitage is the world. His
faculties refer to natures out of him and predict the world he is to
inhabit, as the fins of the fish foreshow that water exists, or the
wings of an eagle in the egg presuppose air. He cannot liv