THE

LADIES' REPOSITORY.

OCTOBER, 1852.

might swing in symphony with the spheres, and its hands go round the circle of duty in harmony with the heavens! Habitual inattention to the outer world greatly promotes attention to the inner. The more we live the life of sensation the less we do the life of reflection. "For the flesh lusteth against the spirit, and the spirit against the flesh, for they are contrary to each other." It is said of Democritus that he put out his eyes in order that he might study philosophy. The story is probably untrue; but it is certain that Poesy put out the eyes of Homer and of Milton before she lifted the vail from their glorious spirits. I pity you not, blind old bard of Scio's rocky isle, as you roll in vain your quenched eyeballs to find a ray of light, for so much the more melodious was the epic that you warbled through the listening cities of your native seas! Nor thee, thou second Homer, but greater than the first, do I pity, as you sweep from your well-tuned lyre those plaintive pentameters:

"Thus with the year

Seasons return; but not to me returns
Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn,
Or sight of vernal bloom or summer's rose,
Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine;
But cloud instead and ever-during dark
Surrounds me."

No; I pity you not, because so much the more
didst thou wander "where the Muses haunt"-so
much the more did "celestial light shine inward,"
and raise up things invisible to mortal sight.

The patience, study, and retirement requisite that we may look inward will be well rewarded; for,

1. The inner world is a new one. The youth usually knows as little of it as of foreign land. He has, it is true, vague ideas of it, as he has of orange groves and palm-trees of which he has read but never seen. It were glorious to discover even an unknown island. Columbus, as he was approaching the New World, was accustomed to close each day, in the midst of his assembled sailors, on deck, with a solemn meditation and a hymn of praise to God. On the evening before he saw the land, and while he was gazing at the indications of its near presence, he sat musing at the stern, and as he inquired, "What is the world upon which I am entering? who are its inhabitants? how will they receive me? and what will be the consequences of my landing to myself, to Spain, to the world?" his feelings became overwhelming. But within your breast, immortal man, there is a still more glorious world. Columbus could take possession of America in the name of his sovereign only; he was to leave it almost as soon as he touched it; he could not give so much as his own name to its shores. The undiscovered continents of thought that lie within your breast you may name, and hold, and occupy at will and forever. That country which Columbus discovered was seen by millions of eyes before he saw it, and has been by millions since; but the world within you is

unlike all others, and no eye but yours can behold its scenes or trace its revolutions, except the allseeing One.

Lovely as is the comparison with

2. This world is one of beauty.
outer world, it has no beauty in
the exceeding beauty of the inner. The beauty of
| material things is but one; that of the mind
threefold-the beauty of the present, of the past,
and of the future. I know that not all within is
beautiful. There are marks even in the soul of
dislocation and disorder; there are chasms, and
storms, and deserts, often more awful than those of
the external world; yet over the whole a grandeur,
like to that of archangel ruined, reigns. The
heavens and the earth are drawn within us in
those forms in which the soul has most delight;
the past, too, is there, according to the affinities of
our minds. It is prevailing disposition that paints
the panorama of remembered thought, and cher-
ished joys that display the figures of the fore-
ground; and as the canvas of memory stretches,
the more charming scenes of the foreground acquire
greater relative prominence, so that remembrance
gives us, with ever-increasing vividness, the scenes
of our earlier and happier hours, when Nature pre-
sented itself to us with all the freshness, and
beauty, and purity of youth to our light and loving
hearts. The village green of our boyish gambols,
and the oak which first shaded our heads, and the
bower where we first told our love, are the first
objects on which the inner eye rests when it turns
to the past. And then the persons who are they?
Those whom we first loved-and how? in their
happiest moods and their sweetest expression. Do
they now slumber in the narrow house? We see
them not writhing in the agonies of the death-bed,
or cold and motionless in the shroud. Memory can
say, "O, Death, where is thy sting! O, Grave,
where is thy victory!" for she gives us back the
dead even in the loveliest forms they wore. The
poor, bereaved Irish emigrant, when he forgets the
desolation of the present, and looks into the past,
sees not the darkness of the tomb. Hark!

"I am sitting on the stile, Mary,
Where we sat side by side."

What does he see? Hark!

"And the springing corn, and the bright May morn, When first you were my bride."

Even though the specters of past sins and the shadows of departed sorrows arise, they come before us with softened and solacing tints, and melt the soul into a salutary tenderness, which is often felt to be luxurious. The future, too, is within. Hope-the busy artist of the mind-runs forward and paints the approaching scenes in light; and though the picture perpetually vanishes or darkens behind him, the mental limner never tires, but rushes onward, ever busy and ever brightening the future. The beauties of nature are fixed; not so the beauties of the mind-they are changeable at will. As the genius pores over his mental treasures,

THE INNER WORLD.

"Anon ten thousand shapes,

Like specters trooping to the wizard's call,
Flit swift before him. From the womb of earth,
From ocean's bed they come; the eternal heavens
Disclose their splendors, and the dark abyss
Pours out her births unknown. With fixed gaze
He marks the rising phantoms: now compares
Their different forms, now blends them, now divides,
Enlarges, and extenuates by turns,
Opposes, ranges in fantastic bands,
And infinitely varies."

The beauties of nature are attended with deformi-
ties. The mind can present us with thornless roses
and unmingled fragrance. Milton's Eden blooms
with beauties that can be combined only in the
soul.

The beauty of the inner world is an independent one. It is only poetically that matter can be said to have beauty at all; philosophically, beauty, like color and fragrance, belongs exclusively to spirit

"Mind alone. Bear witness earth and heaven,
The living fountain in itself contains
Things beauteous and sublime! Here, hand in hand,
Sit paramount the graces. Here enthroned
Celestial Venus, with divinest airs,
Invites the soul to never-fading joys."

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thee are all the elementary principles of that philosopher's immortal demonstrations. Although thou canst not take the dimensions of the rice-field that limits thy labors, thou hast within thy mind the mathematics that can measure and weigh the most distant planet in space. Is swiftness sublime? Ask the lightning. But thought mocks its lazy foot. It touches all things with a celerity that is nearly equivalent to ubiquity; for it oversteps a space that, for its distance, can scarce be measured, in a time that, for its shortness, can scarce be noted. Is mystery sublime? How mysterious are the faculties of the mind! Imagination is the image of omnipresence. It soars backward, or upward, or downward, as on wings of light; or rushing onward, with the mien and the majesty of an angel, it may cross the boundaries of creation, and having perched on the limits of possibility, may spread its triumphant wing, and proudly perform its gyrations on the clouds beyond. Memory is the image of omniscience. It unrolls a canvas on which earth and skies are outspread; so that though the eye may be closed, the soul, within its little tenement, can examine all the hues and forms of sensible things in its impressions of the past. It sends its telegraphic wires back to the green of our earliest gambols, and, pushing its magnetic lines through the tomb, it brings us messages from eternity-the thousand joys, and kindnesses, and loves of the lost and redeemed ones. Reason is the image of divine wisdom. It gives us a knowledge of relations-in proportion to which our views expand. With nothing but perception, conception, and consciousness, we are fettered in mind as one bound to a stake would be in body. By tracing relations, we break our chains, and extend our walks farther and farther through the universe. Reason often, like the architect, looks along the chain of causes and effects, and sees results of which the agents that are to produce them have no concep3. That the inner world is a sublime one. Great tion. How little progress would men make withextent is sublime. Hence, in part, the sublimity out its speculations! Say that speculation is a of the sky, the expanded seas. He who is confined shadow; yet by a shadow Thales learned to measwithin the boundaries of sense dwells in a narrow ure a pyramid. Say, with Aristophanes, that phihouse; he who abides within occupies a large space. losophy is in the clouds; if some one had not been Deprived of all his senses, he may walk abroad, there, who would have calculated eclipses? Say, and, even on his couch of straw, enjoy a liberty if you will, that the lines of scientific light are that tyrants might envy, and a range that sensual- intangible and imaginary; so are the solstices and ists can never know. Is depth sublime? Who ecliptic; but the sun observes them, and the heavens has stood upon the verge of the precipice, and are taught by them, and the year is divided by them, looked from cliff to cliff? did not his eyes grow and commerce, and history, and law, and love fall dim and his brain reel? God has said, "The heart into order by their guidance. Say, if you will, that is deep." Plummet line may fathom ocean; but the speculative reason wheels in air; and what shall who hath sounded the depths of human passion, or we say of the earth which spins on nothing yet bears human reason, or human will? In thy breast is you safely? You rejoice in maps, and dial plates, the whole history of man, past and to come, in and steam-engines, and railways, and telegraphs; epitome; for in it are the fountains whence all but all, all, were first drafted in the reasoning human actions flow. Look into the deep well of soul, as the universe was drafted in the mind of thy heart, and thou shalt see down into the heart God before it uprose from chaos. Even when the of Adam. From the depths of thy reason thou labors of enlightened reason do not result in any canst draw up the ladder that raised Newton to the material benefit, still they are always improving, skies. Untutored slave though you may be, within | always desirable, always grand. How superhuman

The outward world, I know, wakes up the beauty slumbering within; but, in return for the favor, the soul throws its own charms over its senseless forms. He who would see a paradise without must first make a paradise within; then as his soul passes out through the senses, she will make ever new discoveries of beauty from the reflected hues of her own fancy, and will give every hill and promontory a new name, and derive from it a new joy, from its resemblance to some picture which the inner eye alone has seen. Hyperides once pleaded for a guilty woman; but finding that his eloquence was vain, he drew the vail from the beautiful bosom of his

client, and won his cause. O could I but expose the beauties of your own breasts, I need not add,

appears Pythagoras pointing out that system of the universe which it required twenty centuries of subsequent observation and study to demonstrate! How grand Seneca, when in remote antiquity he predicts the discovery of a new world upon our planet! How angelic Roger Bacon, projecting his mind so far forward of his age that his cotemporaries deemed him an infernal being, and subsequent times, whose discoveries he had anticipated, looked back upon him as a supernal one!

How grand a movement of mind is generalization! What a wonderful pregnancy does it give to words! Each general term is a swarming city of thoughts a word may describe a weight which the planet Jupiter could not carry on his bosom, and a few figures, that we play with as a child with its toys, may be made to lift the screen from the immensities of Jehovah's works.

And what shall we say of the will? which says to the wilderness, bloom, and it is as the garden of Eden; which says to the mountain, be open, and the bowels of the rock are blasted out; which makes a path through the sea, and a pillar of cloud and fire, on an iron pathway, through the desert; which tameth the tiger, and maketh a plaything of the lion; which grasps the impending thunderbolt, and hides its powerless flash in the bosom of the earth? And O what awful power does the will sometimes exert within the dominions of the soul! See that martyr laid upon the rack! Every limb is stretched, and every nerve thrills with agony. A single word, and the prisoner will be relieved and restored to his friends. How shall he avoid uttering it? Will not his intellect rebel? Will not his heart cry out? Will not his tongue, for an instant, break loose? Wait and see. Hark! the heavy instrument falls, and a bone is broken, and the sharp fragments pierce through the quivering flesh. An interval follows-a dreadful interval-and, in the midst of the agony, the executioner demands the word of recantation; but that tongue which utters forth groans that make a city shudder lisps not a syllable. Slowly the instrument descends again, and another bone is broken, and another, till every limb is in fragments, and the whole body lies lacerated and bleeding; and now the executioner approaches, and the dews of death are upon the martyr's brow, and though the tongue speaks sweetly and freely of Jesus, and of the land where the weary rest, it is mute as the grave as to recantation. Zeno, on the rack, lest his tongue should betray him, bit it off, and spit it out in the face of his judge. The human will is, perhaps, the most sublime of all things. That Power which wields the lightning and moves the storm, which scatters worlds through space as the husbandman casts seed into the furrow, which by a look of terror could blast the universe, suffers the will of man to rise up against itself. How terrible looks the fabled Atreus, glutted with his banquet of revenge, when the justice of the gods comes down upon the feast! Bolt after bolt falls on every

side, yet the untamed will of the rebel, as if in triumph, looks up from the sea of fire, and cries, "Thunder, ye powerless gods; I am avenged." And such a scene-yea, and more dreadful-do we see every day enacted in the sinner's breast, where the will sits, amid the ruins of the soul, an outcast from God, and, though on earth, like Satan in the pit, saying, in its desolation, as it approaches the tomb,

"Hail, horrors! hail!

Infernal world! and thou, profoundest hell,
Receive thy new possessor."

There is a power behind the will as awful as the will itself-the heart. This is the image of creative energy. To a great extent it shapes the character, molds the words, and directs the actions of men. Give me a perfect knowledge of a man's heart, and I can give you his character and course in general results. The judgment, I know, is the informer of the heart, and the memory, and the fancy, and the will, and the conscience, and the providence of God, are its checks and modifiers; but upon all of these, except the last, it has a reflex and most potent influence: sometimes blinding the judgment, giving tone to the fancy, forcing the will, and perverting the conscience. Hence, it is that part of our nature upon which chiefly the fires of depravity burn, and upon which, too, the dews of grace distill.

We are accustomed to give too much credit to intellect in the works of creative genius. Poetry, eloquence, etc., are the spontaneous results of influences little heeded and little understood. Genius, in its happiest moods, when throwing the hues of sensible things over the regions of the spirit, or the coloring of the soul over the scenery of the earth, is but sweetly yielding to the laws that shape the thoughts of the infant on his hobby. While the poet may think that he is steering his heart, his heart may be directing him, telling him where to stop in his spiritual journey, compelling him to survey the scenery around him, and even pointing him to the very colors in which he should dip his brush. The philosopher who is indignant at the prejudices of others may have his own intellect tinged with unperceived prejudices, expressed in the very words in which he declaims against the errors that he exposes. The revolt of the common mind at what seems artificial, and the great law of criticism which condemns every thing that does not seem natural, shows how little of the achievements of genius are due to his volition. To give the mind such a tone that its spontaneous sugges tions shall be worthy to be uttered-this is the labor of the heart.

The heart is the index to the faculty of association. Every hill, and river, and blossom which presents itself to us opens a department of thought, and lets loose a crowd of images, grand or mean, useful or pernicious, according to our previous trains of thought; and these trains of thought depend | chiefly upon the heart. To the holy, for example,