depths of Time, is a subject for prophetic conjecture, wherein brightest hope is not unmingled with fearful apprehension and awe at the boundless unknown. The more cheering is this one thing which we do see and molten into it, and anew bodied forth from it, or stand unconsumed among its fiery surges. Wo to him whose Edifice is not built of true Asbest, and on the everlasting Rock; but on the false sand, and of the drift-wood of Accident, and the paper and parchment of anti-know-That its tendency is to a universal quated Habit! For the power, or powers, exist not on our Earth, that can say to that sea, roll back, or bid its proud waves be still. What form so omnipotent an element will assume; how long it will welter to and fro as a wild Democracy, a wild Anarchy; what Constitution and Organization it will fashion for itself, and for what depends on it, in the European Commonweal; that the wisest in all nations will communicate and co-operate; whereby Europe will again have its true Sacred College, and Council of Amphictyous; wars will become rarer, less inhuman, and, in the course of centuries, such delirious ferocity in nations, as in individuals it already is, may be proscribed, and become obsolete for ever. TRAGEDY OF THE NIGHT-MOTH. Magna Ausus. [FRASER'S MAGAZINE, 1831.] "T is placid midnight, stars are keeping But see! a wandering Night-moth enters, A while keeps hovering round, then ventures With awe she views the candle blazing; To moth-savante with rapture gazing, Or fount whence Life and Motion streams. What passions in her small heart whirling, Hopes boundless, adoration, dread; At length her tiny pinions twirling, She darts and-puff!-the moth is dead! The sullen flame, for her scarce sparkling, Gives but one hiss, one fitful glare; Now bright and busy, now all darkling, She snaps and fades to empty air. Her bright gray form that spread so slimly, Some fan she seemed of pigmy Queen; Her silky cloak that lay so trimly, Her wee, wee eyes that looked so keen, Give to this creature shape again? Poor moth! near weeping I lament thee, "T was zeal for "things too high” that sent thee From cheery earth to shades below. Short speck of boundless space was needed For home, for kingdom, world to thee! Where passed unheeding as unheeded, Thy slender life from sorrow free. But syren hopes from out thy dwelling, Enticed thee, bade thee Earth explore,- Poor moth thy fate my own resembles: To seek the good I ne'er shall find. I might have lived and ne'er lamented, But Nature's majesty unveiling, Like thee, I rushed into her arms. What gained we, little moth? Thy ashes, CHARACTERISTICS.* [EDINBURGH REVIEW, 1831.] THE healthy know not of their health, but issued clear victorious force; we stood as in only the sick: this is the Physician's Aphorism; the centre of Nature, giving and receiving, in and applicable in a far wider sense than he harmony with it all; unlike Virgil's Husbandgives it. We may say, it holds no less in men, "too happy because we did not know our moral, intellectual, political, poetical, than in | blessedness." In those days, health and sickmerely corporeal therapeutics; that wherever, ness were foreign traditions that did not conor in what shape soever, powers of the sort cern us; our whole being was as yet One, the which can be named vital are at work, herein whole man like an incorporated Will. Such, lies the test of their working right, or working were Rest or ever-successful Labour the huwrong. man lot, might our life continue to be: a pure, perpetual, unregarded music; a beam of perfect white light, rendering all things visible, but itself unseen, even because it was of that perfect whiteness, and no irregular obstruction had yet broken it into colours. The beginning of Inquiry is Disease: all Science, if we consider well, as it must have originated in the feeling of something being wrong, so it is and continues to be but Division, Dismemberment, and partial healing of the wrong. Thus, as was of old written, the Tree of Knowledge springs from a root of evil, and bears fruits of good and evil. Had Adam remained in Paradise, there had been no Anatomy and no Metaphysics. In the Body, for example, as all doctors are agreed, the first condition of complete health is, that each organ perform its function unconsciously, unheeded; let but any organ announce its separate existence, were it even boastfully, and for pleasure, not for pain, then already has one of those unfortunate "false centres of sensibility" established itself, already is derangement there. The perfection of bodily wellbeing is, that the collective bodily activities seem one; and be manifested, moreover, not in themselves, but in the action they accomplish. If a Dr. Kitchener boast that his system is in high order, Dietetic Philosophy may indeed take credit; but the true Peptician was that Countryman who answered that, "for his part, But, alas, as the Philosopher declares; "Life he had no system." In fact, unity, agreement, itself is a disease; a working incited by sufis always silent, or soft-voiced; it is only dis-fering" action from passion! The memory cord that loudly proclaims itself. So long as the several elements of Life, all fitly adjusted, can pour forth their movement like harmonious tuned strings, it is a melody and unison; Life, from its mysterious fountains, flows out as in celestial music and diapason,-which also, like that other music of the spheres, even because it is perennial and complete, without interruption and without imperfection, might be fabled to escape the ear. Thus, too, in some languages, is the state of health well denoted by a term expressing unity; when we feel ourselves as we wish to be, we say that we are whole. ་ . of that first state of Freedom and paradisiac Unconsciousness has faded away into an ideal poetic dream. We stand here too conscious of many things: with Knowledge, the symptom of Derangement, we must even do our best to restore a little Order. Life is, in few instances, and at rare intervals, the diapason of a heavenly melody; oftenest the fierce jar of disruptions and convulsions, which, do what we will, there is no disregarding. Nevertheless, such is still the wish of Nature on our behalf; in all vital action, her manifest purpose and effort is, that we should be unconscious of it, Few mortals, it is to be feared, are perma- and, like the peptic Countryman, never know nently blessed with that felicity of "having no that we "have a system." For indeed vital system:" nevertheless, most of us, looking action everywhere is emphatically a means, back on young years, may remember seasons not an end; Life is not given us for the mere of a light, aërial translucency and elasticity, sake of Living, but always with an ulterior and perfect freedom; the body had not yet external Aim: neither is it on the process, on become the prison-house of the soul, but was the means, but rather on the result, that Naits vehicle and implement, like a creature of ture, in any of her doings, is wont to intrust us the thought, and altogether pliant to its bid- with insight and volition. Boundless as is the ding. We knew not that we had limbs, we domain of man, it is but a small fractional only lifted, hurled, and leapt; through eye and proportion of it that he rules with Consciousear, and all avenues of sense, came clear un-ness and by Forethought: what he can conimpeded tidings from without, and from within 1. An Essay on the Origin and Prospects of Man. By Thomas Hope. 3 vols. 8vo. London, 1831. 2. Philosophische Vorlesungen, insbesondere über Philosophie der sprache und des Wortes. Geschrieben und vorgetragen zu Dresden im December, 1828, und in den ersten Tagen des Januars 1829. (Philosophical Lectures, especially on the Philosophy of Language and the Gift of Speech. Written and delivered at Dresden in December, 1828, and the early days of January, 1829.) By Friedrich von Schlegel. 8vo. Vienna, 1830. trive, nay, what he can altogether know and comprehend, is essentially the mechanical, small; the great is ever, in one sense or other, the vital; it is essentially the mysterious, and only the surface of it can be understood. But Nature, it might seem, strives, like a kind mother, to hide from us even this, that she is a mystery: she will have us rest on her beautiful and awful bosom as if it were our secure home ; on. he bottomless, boundless Deep, whereon all human things fearfully and wonderfully swim, she will have us walk and build, as if the film which supported us there (which any scratch of a bare bodkin will rend asunder, any sputter of a pistol-shot instantaneously burn up) were no film, but a solid rock-foundation. For ever in the neighbourhood of an inevitable Death, man can forget that he is born to die; of his Life, which, strictly meditated, contains in it an Immensity and an Eternity, he can conceive lightly, as of a simple implement wherewith to do day-labour and earn wages. So cunningly does Nature, the mother of all highest art, which only apes her from afar, "body forth the Finite from the Infinite;" and guide man safe on his wondrous path, not more by endowing him with vision, than, at the right place, with blindness! Under all her works, chiefly under her noblest work, Life, lies a basis of Darkness, which she benignantly conceals; in Life, too, the roots and inward circulations which stretch down fearfully to the regions of Death and Night, shall not hint of their existence, and only the fair stem with its leaves and flowers, shone on by the fair sun, disclose itself, and joyfully grow. not that it is any thing surprising: Milton, again, is more conscious of his faculty, which accordingly is an inferior one. On the other hand, what cackling and strutting must we not often hear and see, when, in some shape of academical prolusion, maiden speech, review article, this or the other well-fledged goose has produced its goose-egg, of quite measurable value, were it the pink of its whole kind; and wonders why all mortals do not wonder! Foolish enough, too, was the College Tutor's surprise at Walter Shandy; how, though unread in Aristotle, he could nevertheless argue; and not knowing the name of any dialectic tool, handled them all to perfection. Is it the skilfullest Anatomist that cuts the best figure at Sadler's Wells? or does the Boxer hit better for knowing that he has a flexor longus and a flexor brevis? But, indeed, as in the higher case of the Poet, so here in that of the Speaker and Inquirer, the true force is an unconscious one. The healthy Understanding, we should say, is not the Logical, argumentative, but the Intuitive; for the end of Understanding is not to prove, and find reasons, but However, without venturing into the abstruse, to know and believe. Of Logic, and its limits, or too eagerly asking Why and How, in things and uses and abuses, there were much to be where our answer must needs prove, in great said and examined; one fact, however, which part, an echo of the question, let us be content chiefly concerns us here, has long been to remark farther, in the merely historical familiar; that the man of logic and the man way, how that Aphorism of the bodily Physi- of insight; the Reasoner and the Discoverer, or cian holds good in quite other departments. even Knower, are quite separable,—indeed, for Of the Soul, with her activities, we shall find most part, quite separate characters. In pracit no less true than of the Body: nay, cry the tical matters, for example, has it not become Spiritualists, is not that very division of the almost proverbial that the man of logic cannot unity, Man, into a dualism of Soul and Body, prosper? This is he whom business people itself the symptom of disease; as, perhaps, call Systematic and Theorizer and Wordyour frightful theory of Materialism, of his monger; his vital intellectual force lies dormant being but a Body, and therefore, at least, once or extinct, his whole force is mechanical, conmore a unity, may be the paroxysm which scious: of such a one it is foreseen that, when was critical, and the beginning of cure! But once confronted with the infinite complexities omitting this, we observe, with confidence of the real world, his little compact theorem enough, that the truly strong mind, view it as of the world will be found wanting; that unless Intellect, as Morality, or under any other as he can throw it overboard, and become a new pect, is nowise the mind acquainted with its creature, he will necessarily founder. Nay, strength; that here as before the sign of health in mere Speculation itself, the most ineffectual is Unconsciousness. In our inward, as in our of all characters, generally speaking, is your outward world, what is mechanical lies open dialectic man-at-arms; were he armed cap-ato us: not what is dynamical and has vitality.pie in syllogistic mail of proof, and perfect Of our Thinking, we might say, it is but master of logic-fence, how little does it avail the mere upper surface that we shape into him! Consider the old Schoolmen, and their articulate Thoughts;-underneath the region pilgrimage towards Truth: the faithfullest of argument and conscious discourse lies the endeavour, incessant unwearied motion, often region of meditation; here, in its quiet myste- great natural vigour; only no progress: nothing rious depths, dwells what vital force is in us; but antic feats of one limb poised against the here, if aught is to be created, and not merely other; there they balanced, somersetted, and manufactured and communicated, must the made postures; at best gyrated swiftly, with work go on. Manufacture is intelligible, but some pleasure, like Spinning Dervishes, and trivial; Creation is great, and cannot be un-ended where they began. So it is, so will it derstood. Thus if the Debator and Demon-always be, with all System-makers and builders strator, whom we may rank as the lowest of of logical card-castles; of which class a certrue thinkers, knows what he has done, and │tain remnant must, in every age, as they do in how he did it, the Artist, whom we rank as the highest, knows not; must speak of Inspiration, and, in one or the other dialect, call his work the gift of a divinity. But on the whole, "genius is ever a secret to itself;" of this old truth we have, on all sides, daily evidence. The Shakspeare takes no airs for writing Hamlet and the Tempest, understands our own, survive and build. Logic is good, but it is not the best. The Irrefragable Doctor, with his chains of induction, his corollaries, dilemmas, and other cunning logical diagrams and apparatus, will cast you a beautiful horoscope, and speak reasonable things; neverthe less your stolen jewel, which you wanted him to find you, is not forthcoming. Often by some winged word, winged as the thunderbolt is, of a Luther, a Napoleon, a Goethe, shall we see the difficulty split asunder, and its secret laid bare; while the Irrefragable, with all his logical tools, hews at it, and hovers round it, and finds it on all hands too hard for him. Again in the difference between Oratory and Rhetoric, as indeed everywhere in that superiority of what is called the Natural over the Artificial, we find a similar illustration. The Orator persuades and carries all with him, he knows not how; the Rhetorician can prove that he ought to have persuaded and carried all with him; the one is in a state of healthy unconsciousness, as if he "had no system;" the other, in virtue of regimen and dietetic punctuality, feels at best that "his system is in high order." So stands it, in short, with all forms of Intellect, whether as directed to the finding of Truth, or to the fit imparting thereof; to Poetry, to Eloquence, to depth of Insight, which is the basis of both these; always the characteristic of right performance is a certain spontaneity, an uncon- | sciousness; "the healthy know not of their health, but only the sick.' So that the old precept of the critic, as crabbed as it looked to his ambitious disciple, might contain in it a most fundamental truth, applicable to us all, and in much else than Literature: "Whenever you have written any sentence that looks particularly excellent, be sure to blot it out." In like manner, under milder phraseology, and with a meaning purposely much wider, a living Thinker has taught us: "Of the Wrong we are always conscious, of the Right never." But if such is the law with regard to Speculation and the Intellectual power of man, much more is it with regard to Conduct, and the power, manifested chiefly therein, which we name Moral. "Let not thy left hand know what thy right hand doeth" whisper not to thy own heart, How worthy is this action; for then it is already becoming worthless. The good man is he who works continually in welldoing; to whom well-doing is as his natural existence, awakening no astonishment, requiring no commentary; but there, like a thing of course, and as if it could not but be so. Self-contemplation, on the other hand, is infallibly the symptom of disease, be it or be it not the sign of cure: an unhealthy Virtue is one that consumes itself to leanness in repenting and anxiety; or, still worse, that inflates itself into dropsical boastfulness and vain glory either way, it is a self-seeking; an unprofitable looking behind us to measure the way we have made: whereas the sole concern is to walk continually forward, and make more way. If in any sphere of Man's Life, then in the moral sphere, as the inmost and most vital of all, it is good that there be wholeness; that there be unconsciousness, which is the evidence of this. Let the free, reasonable Will, which dwells in us, as in our Holy of Holies, be indeed free, and obeyed like a Divinity, as is its right and its effort: the perfect obedience | will be the silent one. Such perhaps were the sense of that maxim, enunciating, as is usual, but the half of a truth: "To say that we have a clear conscience is to utter a solecism; had we : never sinned, we should have had no conscience." Were defeat unknown, neither would victory be celebrated by songs of triumph. This, true enough, is an ideal, impossible state of being; yet ever the goa towards which our actual state of being strives; which it is the more perfect the nearer it can approach. Nor, in our actual world, where Labour must often prove ineffectual, and thus in all senses Light alternate with Darkness, and the nature of an ideal Morality be much modified, is the case, thus far, materially different. It is a fact, which escapes no one, that, generally speaking, whoso is acquainted with his worth has but a little stock to cultivate acquaintance with. Above all, the public acknowledgment of such acquaintance, indicating that it has reached quite an intimate footing, bodes ill. Already, to the popular judgment, he who talks much about Virtue in the abstract, begins to be suspicious; it is shrewdly guessed that where there is great preaching, there will be little almsgiving. Or again, on a wider scale, we can remark that ages of Heroism are not ages of Moral Philosophy; Virtue, when it can be philosophized of, has become aware of itself, is sickly, and beginning to decline. A spontaneous habitual all-pervading spirit of Chivalrous Valour shrinks together, and perks itself up into shrivelled Points of Honour; humane Courtesy and Nobleness of mind dwindles into punctilious Politeness," avoiding meats;" "paying tithe of mint and anise, neglecting the weightier matters of the law." Goodness, which was a rule to itself, must appeal to Precept, and seek strength from Sanctions; the Freewill no longer reigns unquestioned and by divine right, but like a mere earthly sovereign, by expediency, by Rewards and Punishments: or rather, let us say, the Freewill, so far as may be, has abdicated and withdrawn into the dark, and a spectral nightmare of a Necessity usurps its throne; for now that mysterious Self-impulse of the whole man, heaven-inspired, and in all senses partaking of the Infinite, being captiously questioned in a finite dialect, and answering, as it needs must, by silence,-is conceived as non-extant, and only the outward Mechanism of it remains acknowledged: of Volition, except as the synonym of Desire, we hear nothing; of “Motives," without any Mover, more than enough. So, too, when the generous Affections have become well-nigh paralytic, we have the reign of Sentimentality. The greatness, the profitableness, at any rate the extremely ornamental nature of high feeling, and the luxury of doing good; charity, love, self-forgetfulness, devotedness, and all manner of godlike magnanimity are everywhere insisted on, and pressingly inculcated in speech and writing, in prose and verse; Socinian Preachers proclaim "Benevolence" to all the four winds, and have TRUTH engraved on their watchseals: unhappily with little or no effect. Were the Limbs in right Walking order, why so much demonstrating of Motion? The barrenest of all mortals is the Sentimentalist. Granting even that he were sincere, and did not wilfully deceive us, or without first deceiving himself, what good is in him? Does he not lie there as a perpetual lesson of despair, and type of bedrid valetudinarian impotence? His is emphatically a Virtue that has become, through every fibre, conscious of itself; it is all sick, and feels as if it were made of glass and durst not touch or be touched in the shape of work, it can do nothing; at the utmost, by incessant nursing and caudling, keep itself alive. As the last stage of all, when Virtue, properly so called, has ceased to be practised, and become extinct, and a mere remembrance, we have the era of Sophists, descanting of its existence, proving it, denying it, mechanically "accounting" for it;-as dissectors and demonstrators cannot operate till once the body be dead. Thus is true Moral genius, like true intellectual, which indeed is but a lower phasis thereof, "ever a secret to itself." The healthy moral nature loves Goodness, and without wonder wholly lives in it; the unhealthy makes love to it, and would fain get to live in it; or, finding such courtship fruitless, turns round, and not without contempt, abandons it. These curious relations of the Voluntary and Conscious to the Involuntary and Unconscious, and the small proportion which, in all departments of our life, the former bears to the latter,-might lead us into deep questions of Psychology and Physiology: such, however, belong not to our present object. Enough, if the fact itself become apparent, that Nature so meant it with us; that in this wise we are made. We may now say, that view man's individual Existence under what aspect we will, under the highest Spiritual, as under the merely Animal aspect, everywhere the grand vital energy, while in its sound state, is an unseen, unconscious one; or, in the words of our old Aphorism, "the healthy know not of their health, but only the sick." To understand man, however, we must look beyond the individual man and his actions or interests, and view him in combination with his fellows. It is in Society that man first 'feels what he is; first becomes what he can be. In Society an altogether new set of spiritual activities are evolved in him, and the old immeasurably quickened and strengthened. Society is the genial element wherein his nature first lives and grows; the solitary man were but a small portion of himself, and must continue for ever folded in, stunted, and only half alive. Already," says a deep Thinker, with more meaning than will disclose itself at once, "my opinion, my conviction, gains infinitely in strength and sureness, the moment a second mind has adopted it." Such, even in its simplest form, is association; so wondrous the communion of soul with soul as directed to the mere act of Knowing! In other higher acts, the wonder is still more manifest; as in that portion of our being which we name the Moral: for properly, indeed, all communion is of a moral sort, whereof such intellectual communion, (in the act of knowing,) is itself an example. But with regard to Morals strictly so called, it is in Society, we might almost say, that Morality begins; here at least it takes an altogether new form, and on every side, as in living growth, expands itself. The Duties of Man to himself, to what is Highest in himself, make but the First Table of the Law: to the First Table is now superadded a Second, with the duties of Man to his Neighbour; whereby also the significance of the first now assumes its true importance. Man has joined himself with man; soul acts and reacts on soul; a mystic miraculous unfathomable Union establishes itself; Life, in all its elements, has become intensated, consecrated. The lightningspark of Thought, generated, or say rather heaven-kindled, in the solitary mind, awakens its express likeness in another mind, in a thousand other minds, and all blaze up together in combined fire; reverberated from mind to mind, fed also with fresh fuel in each, it acquires incalculable new Light as Thought, incalculable new Heat as converted into Action. By and by, a common store of Thought can accumulate, and be transmitted as an everlasting possession: Literature, whether as preserved in the memory of Bards, in Runes and Hieroglyphs engraved on stone, or in Books of written or printed paper, comes into existence, and begins to play its wondrous part. Politics are formed; the weak submitting to the strong; with a willing loyalty, giving obedience that he may receive guidance: or say rather, in honour of our nature, the ignorant submitting to the wise; for so it is in all even the rudest communities, man never yields himself wholly to brute Force, but always to moral Greatness; thus the universal title of respect, from the Oriental Scheik, from the Sachem of the red Indians, down to our English Sir, implies only that he whom we mean to honour is our senior, Last, as the crown and all-supporting keystone of the fabric, Religion arises. The devout meditation of the isolated man, which flitted through his soul, like a transient tone of Love and Awe from unknown lands, acquires certainty, continuance, when it is shared in by his brother-men. "Where two or three are gathered together" in the name of the Highest, then first does the Highest, as it is written, "appear among them to bless them;" then first does an Altar and act of united1 Worship open a way from Earth to Heaven; whereon, were it but a simple Jacob's-ladder, the heavenly Messengers will travel, with glad tidings, and unspeakable gifts for men. Such is SOCIETY, the vital articulation of many individuals into a new collective individual: greatly the most important of man's attainments on this earth; that in which, and by virtue of which, all his other attainments and attempts find their arena, and have their value. Considered well, Society is the standing wonder of our existence; a true region of the Supernatural; as it were, a second all-embracing Life, wherein our first individual Life becomes doubly and trebly alive, and whatever of infinitude was in us bodies itself forth, and becomes visible and active. To figure society as endowed with Life is scarcely a metaphor; but rather the statement of a fact by such imperfect methods as language affords. Look at it closely, that mystic Union, Nature's highest work with man, wherein man's volition plays an indispensable yet so subordinate a part, and the small Mechanical grows so mysteriously and indissolubly out of the infinite |