man" of
Mather have vanished; belief in them is no longer possible on the part of
sane men. But this mysterious universe, through which, half veiled in
its own shadow, our dim little planet is wheeling, with its star worlds
and thought-wearying spaces, remains. Nature's mighty miracle is still
over and around us; and hence awe, wonder, and reverence remain to be the
inheritance of humanity; still are there beautiful repentances and holy
deathbeds; and still over the soul's darkness and confusion rises,
starlike, the great idea of duty. By higher and better influences than
the poor spectres of superstition, man must henceforth be taught to
reverence the Invisible, and, in the consciousness of his own weakness,
and sin, and sorrow, to lean with childlike trust on the wisdom and mercy
of an overruling Providence,--walking by faith through the shadow and
mystery, and cheered by the remembrance that, whatever may be his
apparent allotment,--

"God's greatness flows around our incompleteness;
Round our restlessness His rest."

It is a sad spectacle to find the glad tidings of the Christian faith and
its "reasonable service" of devotion transformed by fanaticism and
credulity into superstitious terror and wild extravagance; but, if
possible, there is one still sadder. It is that of men in our own time
regarding with satisfaction such evidences of human weakness, and
professing to find in them new proofs of their miserable theory of a
godless universe, and new occasion for sneering at sincere devotion as
cant, and humble reverence as fanaticism. Alas! in comparison with
such, the religious enthusiast, who in the midst of his delusion still
feels that he is indeed a living soul and an heir of immortality, to whom
God speaks from the immensities of His universe, is a sane man. Better
is it, in a life like ours, to be even a howling dervis or a dancing
Shaker, confronting imaginary demons with Thalaba's talisman of faith,
than to lose the consciousness of our own spiritual nature, and look upon
ourselves as mere brute masses of animal organization,--barnacles on a
dead universe; looking into the dull grave with no hope beyond it; earth
gazing into earth, and saying to corruption, "Thou art my father," and to
the worm, "Thou art my sister."

HAMLET AMONG THE GRAVES. (1844.)

AN amiable enthusiast, immortal in his beautiful little romance of Paul
and Virginia, has given us in his Miscellanies a chapter on t