heart,--could we look upon those of the aged reprobate,--who will
doubt that their darkest passages are those made visible by the
distant gleams from these angelic Forms, that, like the Three which
stood before the tent of Abraham, once looked upon his youth?

And we doubt not that the truest witness to the common source of these
inborn Ideas would readily be acknowledged by all, could they return
to it now with their matured power of introspection, which is, at
least, one of the few advantages of advancing years. But, though
we cannot bring back youth, we may still recover much of its purer
revelations of our nature from what has been left in the memory. From
the dim present, then, we would appeal to that fresher time, ere
the young spirit had shrunk from the overbearing pride of the
understanding, and confidently ask, if the emotions we then felt from
the Beautiful, the True, and the Good, did not seem in some way to
refer to a common origin. And we would also ask, if it was then
frequent that the influence from one was _singly_ felt,--if it
did not rather bring with it, however remotely, a sense of something,
though widely differing, yet still akin to it. When we have basked in
the beauty of a summer sunset, was there nothing in the sky that spoke
to the soul of Truth and Goodness? And when the opening intellect
first received the truth of the great law of gravitation, or felt
itself mounting through the profound of space, to travel with the
planets in their unerring rounds, did never then the kindred Ideas of
Goodness and Beauty chime in, as it were, with the fabled music,--not
fabled to the soul,--which led you on like one entranced?

And again, when, in the passive quiet of your moral nature, so predisposed
in youth to all things genial, you have looked abroad on this marvellous,
ever teeming Earth,--ever teeming alike for mind and body,--and have felt