, "Bonny, bonny birdie! why hasten
frae me?--I wadna skaith a feather o' yer wing." He turned round to me,
and I could see that his eyes were swimming in moisture.

"Can he be other," he said, "than a good and benevolent God, who gives
us moments like these to enjoy? Oh, my friend, without these sabbaths of
the soul, that come to refresh and invigorate it, it would dry up within
us! How exquisite," he continued, "how entire the sympathy which exists
between all that is good and fair in external nature, and all of good
and fair that dwells in our own! And, oh, how the heart expands and
lightens! The world is as a grave to it--a closely-covered grave--and
it shrinks, and deadens, and contracts all its holier and more joyous
feelings under the cold, earth-like pressure. But, amid the grand and
lovely of nature--amid these forms and colours of richest beauty--there
is a disinterment, a resurrection of sentiment; the pressure of our
earthly part seems removed, and those _senses of the mind_, if I may
so speak, which serve to connect our spirits with the invisible world
around us, recover their proper tone, and perform their proper office."

"_Senses of the mind_," I said, repeating the phrase; "the idea is new
to me; but I think I catch your meaning."

"Yes; there are--there must be such," he continued, with growing
enthusiasm; "man is essentially a religious creature--a looker beyond
the grave, from the very constitution of his mind; and the sceptic who
denies it is untrue not merely to the Being who has made and who
preserves him, but to the entire scope and bent of his own nature
besides. Wherever man is--whether he be a wanderer of the wild forest
or still wilder desert, a dweller in some lone isle of the sea, or
the tutored and full-minded denizen of some blessed land like our
own--wherever man is, there is religion--hopes that look forward and
upward--the belief in an unending existence, and a land of separate
souls."

I was carried away by the enthusiasm of my companion, and felt, for the
time, as if my mind had become the mirror of his. There seems to obtain
among men a species of moral gravitation, analogous, in its principles,
to that which regulates and controls the movements of the planetary
system. The larger and more ponderous any body, the greater its
attractive force, and the more overpowering its influence over the
lesser bodies which surround it. The earth we inhabit carries the moon
along with it in it