nd
the great, I saw, as it were, the decree of the indestructibility of
mind. These feelings, though generally considered as poetical, yet, I
think, offer a sound philosophical argument in favour of the immortality
of the soul. In all the habits and instincts of young animals their
feelings or movements may be traced in intimate relation to their
improved perfect state; their sports have always affinities to their
modes of hunting or catching their food, and young birds, even in the
nest, show marks of fondness which, when their frames are developed,
become signs of actions necessary to the reproduction and preservation of
the species. The desire of glory, of honour, of immortal fame, and of
constant knowledge, so usual in young persons of well-constituted minds,
cannot, I think, be other than symptoms of the infinite and progressive
nature of intellect--hopes which, as they cannot be gratified here,
belong to a frame of mind suited to a nobler state of existence.

_The Unknown_.--Religion, whether natural or revealed, has always the
same beneficial influence on the mind. In youth, in health, and
prosperity, it awakens feelings of gratitude and sublime love, and
purifies at the same time that it exalts; but it is in misfortune, in
sickness, in age, that its effects are most truly and beneficially felt;
when submission in faith and humble trust in the Divine will, from duties
become pleasures, undecaying sources of consolation; then it creates
powers which were believed to be extinct, and gives a freshness to the
mind which was supposed to have passed away for ever, but which is now
renovated as an immortal hope; then it is the Pharos, guiding the wave-
tost mariner to his home, as the calm and beautiful still basins or
fiords, surrounded by tranquil groves and pastoral meadows, to the
Norwegian pilot escaping from a heavy storm in the north sea, or as the
green and dewy spot gushing with fountains to the exhausted and thirsty
traveller in the midst of the desert. Its influence outlives all earthly
enjoyments, and becomes stronger as the organs decay and the frame
dissolves; it appears as that evening star of light in the horizon of
life, which, we are sure, is to become in another season a morning star,
and it throws its radiance through the gloom and shadow of death.

DIALOGUE THE FIFTH. THE CHEMICAL PHILOSOPHER.

I had been made religious by the conversations of Ambrosio in Italy; my
faith was strength