mind; I saw love as the creative principle in the material world, and this love only as a Divine attribute.  Then, my own mind, I felt connected with new sensations and indefinite hopes, a thirst for immortality; the great names of other ages and of distant nations appeared to me to be still living around me; and, even in the funeral monuments of the heroic and 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.