cannot repeat a
conversation the day after it took place; while some few have the
doubtful happiness of forgetting nothing. We might go on with a long
list of the various modes and degrees in which this faculty, so
essential to the human being, is everywhere manifested. But this is
sufficient for our purpose. In like manner is the Principle of Harmony
manifested; in one person as it relates to Form, in another to Sound;
so, too, may it vary as to the degrees of truth and goodness. We say
degrees; for we may well doubt whether, even in the faculty of memory,
its apparent absence as to any one essential object is any thing more
than a feeble degree of activity: and the doubt is strengthened by the
fact, that in many seemingly hopeless cases it has been actually, as
it were, brought into birth. And we are still indisposed to admit its
entire absence in any one particular for which it was bestowed on man.
An imperfect developement, especially as relating to the intellectual
and moral, we know to depend, in no slight measure, on the _will_
of the subject. Nay, (with the exception of idiots,) it may safely be
affirmed, that no individual ever existed who could not perceive the
difference between what is true and false, and right and wrong. We
here, of course, except those who have so ingeniously _unmade_
themselves, in order to reconstruct their "humanity" after a better
fashion. As to the "_why_" of these differences, we know nothing;
it is one of those unfathomable mysteries which to the finite mind
must ever be hidden.

Though it has been our purpose, throughout this discourse, to direct
our inquiries mainly to the essential Elements of the subject, it may
not be amiss here to take a brief notice of their collateral product
in those mixed modes from which we derive so large a portion of our
mental gratification: we allude to the various combinations of the
several Ideas, which have just been examined, with each other as well
as with their opposites. To this prolific source may be traced much
of that many-colored interest which we take in their various forms as
presented by the imagination,--in every thing, indeed, which is true,
or even partially true, to the great Principle of Harmony, both in
nature and in art. It is to these mixed modes more especially, that we
owe all that mysterious interest which gives the illusion of life to a
work of fiction, and fills us with delight or melts with woe, whether
in the happiness or