muscular, and so on; there being scarcely a shade of character to
which the imagination does not affix some corresponding form.

In a still more striking form may we find the evidence of the law
supposed, if we turn to the young, and especially to those of a poetic
temperament,--to the sanguine, the open, and confiding, the creatures
of impulse, who reason best when trusting only to the spontaneous
suggestions of feeling. What is more common than implicit faith in
their youthful day-dreams,--a faith that lives, though dream after
dream vanish into common air when the sorcerer Fact touches their
eyes? And whence this pertinacious faith that _will_ not die, but
from a spring of life, that neither custom nor the dry understanding
can destroy? Look at the same Youth at a more advanced age, when the
refining intellect has mixed with his affections, adding thought and
sentiment to every thing attractive, converting all things fair to
things also of good report. Let us turn, at the same time, to one
still more advanced,--even so far as to have entered into the
conventional valley of dry bones,--one whom the world is preparing,
by its daily practical lessons, to enlighten with unbelief. If we see
them together, perhaps we shall hear the senior scoff at his younger
companion as a poetic dreamer, as a hunter after phantoms that never
were, nor could be, in nature: then may follow a homily on the virtues
of experience, as the only security against disappointment. But there
are some hearts that never suffer the mind to grow old. And such we
may suppose that of the dreamer. If he is one, too, who is accustomed
to look into himself,--not as a reasoner,--but with an abiding faith
in his nature,--we shall, perhaps, hear him reply,--Experience, it is
true, has often brought me disappointment; yet I cannot distrust those
dreams, as you call them, bitterly as I have felt their passing off;
for I feel the truth of the source whence they come. They could not