en,
ANNIHILATION! How it yawns before me!
Next moment I may drop from thought, from sense,
The privilege of angels and of worms,
An outcast from existence! and this spirit,
This all-pervading, this all-conscious soul,
This particle of energy divine,
Which travels nature, flies from star to star,
And visits gods, and emulates their powers,
_For ever is extinguish'd._"

If intellect be, indeed, doomed utterly to perish, why may not we ask
God, in that deep despair which, in that case, must inevitably flow from
the consciousness of those powers with which He has at once blessed and
cursed us--why that intellect, whose final doom is death, and that final
doom within a moment, finds no thought that can satisfy it but that of
Life, and no idea in which its flight can be lost but that of Eternity?
If this earth were at once the soul's cradle and her tomb, why should
that cradle have been hung amid the stars, and that tomb illumined by
their eternal light? If, indeed, a child of the clay, was not this
earth, with all its plains, forests, mountains, and seas, capacious
enough for the dreams of that creature whose course was finally to be
extinguished in the darkness of its bosom? What had we to do with
planets, and suns, and spheres, "and all the dread magnificence of
heaven?" Were we framed merely that we might for a few years rejoice in
the beauty of the stars, as in that of the flowers beneath our feet? And
ought we to be grateful for those transitory glimpses of the heavens, as
for the fading splendour of the earth? But the heavens are not an idle
show, hung out for the gaze of that idle dreamer Man. They are the work
of the Eternal God, and He has given us power therein to read and to
understand His glory. It is not our eyes only that are dazzled by the
face of heaven--our souls can comprehend the laws by which that face is
overspread by its celestial smiles. The dwelling-place of our spirits is
already in the heavens. Well are we entitled to give names unto the
stars; for we know the moment of their rising and their setting, and
can be with them at every part of their shining journey through the
boundless ether. While generations of men have lived, died, and are
buried, the astronomer thinks of the golden orb that shone centuries ago
within the vision of man, and lifts up his eye undoubting, at the very
moment when it again comes glorious on its predicted return. Were the
Eternal Bein