the dictates of the other. If fancy presents images not moral or
religious, the mind drives them away when they give it pain; but
when melancholy notions take the form of duty, they lay hold on the
faculties without opposition, because we are afraid to exclude or
banish them. For this reason the superstitious are often
melancholy, and the melancholy almost always superstitious.

"But do not let the suggestions of timidity overpower your better
reason; the danger of neglect can be but as the probability of the
obligation, which, when you consider it with freedom, you find very
little, and that little growing every day less. Open your heart to
the influence of the light, which from time to time breaks in upon
you; when scruples importune you, which you in your lucid moments
know to be vain, do not stand to parley, but fly to business or to
Pekuah; and keep this thought always prevalent, that you are only
one atom of the mass of humanity, and have neither such virtue nor
vice as that you should be singled out for supernatural favours or
afflictions."



CHAPTER XLVII--THE PRINCE ENTERS, AND BRINGS A NEW TOPIC.



"All this," said the astronomer, "I have often thought; but my
reason has been so long subjugated by an uncontrollable and
overwhelming idea, that it durst not confide in its own decisions.
I now see how fatally I betrayed my quiet, by suffering chimeras to
prey upon me in secret; but melancholy shrinks from communication,