nd by the old prescriptions,--the old
quackish Epicurean nostrum of 'Carpe diem,'--'Let us eat, drink,
and be merry, for to-morrow die,'--'We do not know what the morrow may
bring--is like attempting to call back the soul from a moral syncope
by applying to the nostrils a drop of eau de Cologne. 'Enjoy to-day,
we do not know what the morrow will bring!' Why, that is the very
thought which poisons to-day. No, a soul of any worth cannot but
feel an intense wish for the solution of its doubts, even while it
doubts whether they can be solved."

"'Carpe diem' certainly would not be my sole prescription," said
Fellowes; "you have not told me yet what you want."

"No, but I will. The questions on which I want certainty are indeed
questions about which philosophers will often argue just to display
their vanity, as human vanity will argue about any thing; but they
are no sooner felt in their true grandeur, than they absorb the soul."

"Still, what is it you want?"

"I want to know---whence I came; whither I am going. Whether there be,
in truth, as so many say there is, a God,--a tremendous personality,
to whose infinite faculties the 'great' and the 'little' (as we call
them) equally vanish,--whose universal presence fills all space,
in any point of which he exists entire in the amplitude of all his
infinite attributes,--whose universal government extends even to me,
and my fellow-atoms, called men,--within whose sheltering embrace
even I am not too mean for protection;--whether, if there be such
a being, he is truly infinite; or whether this vast machine of the
universe may not have developed tendencies or involved consequences
which eluded his forethought, and are now beyond even his control;
--whether, for this reason, or for some other necessity, such infinite
sorrows have been permitted to invade it;--whether, above all, He be
propitious or offended with a world in which I feel too surely, in
the profound and various misery of man, that his aspects are not all
benignant;--how, if he be offended, he is to be reconciled;--whether
he is at all accessible, or one to whom the pleasures and the
sufferings of the poor child of dust are equally subjects of horrible
indifference;--whether, if such Omnipotent Being created the world, he
has now abandoned it to be the sport of chance, and I am thus an orphan
in the universe;--whether this 'universal frame' be indeed without a
mind, and we are, in fact, the only forms of conscious