rturing riddles which I cannot
solve,--one who could read my heart, light up its darkness, exorcise its
spectres; one in whose wisdom I could welcome a guide through the Nature
which now suddenly changes her aspect, opening out from the walls with
which I had fenced and enclosed her as mine own formal garden;--all her
pathways, therein, trimmed to my footstep; all her blooms grouped and
harmonized to my own taste in colour; all her groves, all her caverns,
but the soothing retreats of a Muse or a Science; opening out--opening
out, desert on desert, into clewless and measureless space! Gone is the
garden! Were its confines too narrow for Nature? Be it so! The Desert
replaces the garden, but where ends the Desert? Reft from my senses are
the laws which gave order and place to their old questionless realm. I
stand lost and appalled amidst Chaos. Did my Mind misconstrue the laws
it deemed fixed and immutable? Be it so! But still Nature cannot be
lawless; Creation is not a Chaos. If my senses deceive me in some
things, they are still unerring in others; if thus, in some things,
fallacious, still, in other things, truthful. Are there within me senses
finer than those I have cultured, or without me vistas of knowledge
which instincts, apart from my senses, divine? So long as I deal
with the Finite alone, my senses suffice me; but when the Infinite is
obtruded upon me there, are my senses faithless deserters? If so, is
there aught else in my royal resources of Man--whose ambition it is,
from the first dawn of his glory as Thinker, to invade and to subjugate
Nature,--is there aught else to supply the place of those traitors, the
senses, who report to my Reason, their judge and their sovereign, as
truths seen and heard tales which my Reason forfeits her sceptre if she
does not disdain as lies? Oh, for a friend! oh, for a guide!"

And as I so murmured, my eye fell upon the form of a kneeling child,--at
the farther end of the burial-ground, beside a grave with its new
headstone gleaming white amidst the older moss-grown tombs, a female
child, her head bowed, her hands clasped. I could see but the outline
of her small form in its sable dress,--an infant beside the dead. My eye
and my thoughts were turned from that silent figure, too absorbed in my
own restless tumult of doubt and dread, for sympathy with the grief or
the consolation of a kneeling child. And yet I should have remembered
that tomb! Again I murmured with a fierce impati