subterranean force, it convulses and divides its surface. Here vast
areas subside into valleys and deep abysses; there mountain peaks shoot
up heavenwards. Mysterious shadows begin to throng the hollows; new
tints and half-tints flicker and shift everywhere; mists hang floating
over ravines and precipices; the vegetation grows more various, here
slenderer, there richer and more luxuriant; whilst high over all, bright
on the topmost summits, is a new strange something--the white snows of
purity, catching the morning streaks on them of a brighter day, that has
never as yet risen upon the world below.

With the subtraction, or nullifying, of the moral force, all this will
go. The mountains will sink, the valleys be filled up; all will be once
more dead level--still indeed parti-coloured, but without light and
shadow, and with the colours reduced in number, and robbed of all their
vividness. The chiaro-oscuro will have gone from life; the moral
landscape, whose beauty and grandeur is at present so much extolled,
will have dissolved like an insubstantial pageant. Vice and virtue will
be set before us in the same grey light; every deeper feeling either of
joy or sorrow, of desire or of repulsion, will lose its vigour, and
cease any more to be resonant.

It may be said indeed, and very truly, that under favourable
circumstances there must always remain a joy in the mere act of living,
in the exercising of the bodily functions, and in the exciting and
appeasing of the bodily appetites. Will anything, it may be asked, for
instance, rob the sunshine of its gladness, or deaden the vital
influence of a spring morning?--when the sky is a cloudless blue, and
the sea is like a wild hyacinth, when the pouring brooks seem to live as
they sparkle, and the early air amongst the woodlands has the breath in
it of unseen violets? All this, it is quite true, will be left to us;