distinct notion of the sublime and beautiful, as
I have seldom since experienced. I recommend every man who has been
fifteen years absent from his native fields to return by moonlight.

Well, there is a mystery yet undiscovered in our being, for no man
can know the full extent of his feelings or his capacities. Many a
slumbering thought, and sentiment, and association reposes within him,
of which he is utterly ignorant, and which, except he come in contact
with those objects whose influence over his mind can alone call them
into being, may never be awakened, or give him one moment of either
pleasure or pain. There is, therefore, a great deal in the position
which we hold in society, and simply in situation. I felt this on that
night: for the tenor of my reflections was new and original, and my
feelings had a warmth and freshness in them, which nothing but the
situation in which I then found myself could give them. The force of
association, too, was powerful; for, as I advanced nearer home, the
names of hills, and lakes, and mountains, that I had utterly forgotten,
as I thought, were distinctly revived in my memory, and a crowd of
youthful thoughts and feelings, that I imagined my intercourse with the
world and the finger of time had blotted out of my being, began to crowd
afresh on my fancy. The name of, a townland would instantly return with
its appearance; and I could now remember the history of families and
individuals that had long been effaced from my recollection.

But what is even more singular is, that the superstitious terrors of
my boyhood began to come over me as formerly, whenever a spot noted
for supernatural appearances met my eye. It was in vain that I exerted
myself to expel them, by throwing the barrier of philosophic reasoning
in their way; they still clung to me, in spite of every effort to the
contrary. But the fact is, that I was, for the moment, the slave of a
morbid and feverish sentiment, that left me completely at the mercy of
the dark and fleeting images that passed over my fancy. I now came to a
turn where the road began to slope down into the depths of a valley
that ran across it. When I looked forward into the bottom of it, all was
darkness impenetrable, for the moon-beams were thrown off by the height
of the mountains that rose on each side of it. I felt an indefinite
sensation of fear, because at that moment I recollected that it had
been, in my younger days, notorious as the scene of an a