"Ay," answered Mordaunt, with a scarcely audible sigh, "that is the
feeling of the lover at the immites ventos, but we sages of the lamp
make our mistress Wisdom, and when the winds rage without it is to her
that we cling. See how, from the same object, different conclusions
are drawn! The most common externals of nature, the wind and the
wave, the stars and the heavens, the very earth on which we tread,
never excite in different bosoms the same ideas; and it is from our
own hearts, and not from an outward source, that we draw the hues
which colour the web of our existence."

"It is true," answered Clarence. "You remember that in two specks of
the moon the enamoured maiden perceived two unfortunate lovers, while
the ambitious curate conjectured that they were the spires of a
cathedral? But it is not only to our feelings, but also to our
reasonings, that we give the colours which they wear. The moral, for
instance, which to one man seems atrocious, to another is divine. On
the tendency of the same work what three people will agree? And how
shall the most sanguine moralist hope to benefit mankind when he finds
that, by the multitude, his wisest endeavours to instruct are often
considered but as instruments to pervert?"

"I believe," answered Mordaunt, "that it is from our ignorance that
our contentions flow: we debate with strife and with wrath, with
bickering and with hatred; but of the thing debated upon we remain in
the profoundest darkness. Like the labourers of Babel, while we
endeavour in vain to express our meaning to each other, the fabric by
which, for a common end, we would have ascended to heaven from the
ills of earth remains forever unadvanced and incomplete. Let us hope
that knowledge is the universal language which shall reunite us. As,
in their sublime allegory, the Ancients signified that only through