unwitnessed soul."

Sibyll had left Hastings by her father's side, and tripped lightly to
the farther part of the house, inhabited by the rustic owners who
supplied the homely service, to order the evening banquet,--the happy
banquet; for hunger gives not such flavour to the viand, nor thirst
such sparkle to the wine, as the presence of a beloved guest.

And as the courtier seated himself on the rude settle under the
honeysuckles that wreathed the porch, a delicious calm stole over his
sated mind. The pure soul of the student, released a while from the
tyranny of an earthly pursuit,--the drudgery of a toil, that however
grand, still but ministered to human and material science,--had found
for its only other element the contemplation of more solemn and
eternal mysteries. Soaring naturally, as a bird freed from a golden
cage, into the realms of heaven, he began now, with earnest and
spiritual eloquence, to talk of the things and visions lately made
familiar to his thoughts. Mounting from philosophy to religion, he
indulged in his large ideas upon life and nature: of the stars that
now came forth in heaven; of the laws that gave harmony to the
universe; of the evidence of a God in the mechanism of creation; of
the spark from central divinity, that, kindling in a man's soul, we
call "genius;" of the eternal resurrection of the dead, which makes
the very principle of being, and types, in the leaf and in the atom,
the immortality of the great human race. He was sublimer, that gray
old man, hunted from the circle of his kind, in his words, than ever
is action in its deeds; for words can fathom truth, and deeds but
blunderingly and lamely seek it.

And the sad and gifted and erring intellect of Hastings, rapt from its