Burkes, and Sheridans of Ireland are her protest against being forgotten, and her pledge of the faculties essential to fame. To have produced the most powerful writer of the Augustan age of England, the greatest political philosopher of the age of Pitt and Fox, and the most brilliant wit in the annals of the drama, are the trophies of the Irish mind. Whether the memories of those men are to be regarded only as relics, hallowed with an idle regret, and venerated with a fruitless admiration, or to be the inspirers of the generations to come; whether they are to be like images on the tomb, only reminding us of the noble dust that sleeps below, or illustrious examples, who, "though dead, still speak ;" whether they are to be stars, whose lustre only contrasts with the darkness of the surrounding horizon, or "heralds of the dawn," all must depend on the encouragement of the national genius.

But she must be no longer treated as a farm for the simple raising of English food, a nursery for the young statesmanship of England, a field for foolish faction, or a grave for generation after generation of an ardent, unhappy, and disappointed people.

She must be in reality what she was once in name, Insula Sanctorum. The hierarchy have the fate of the country largely in their hands. The Reformation must be extended by the impartial bestowal of their patronage, by the personal proof of their talents, and by the practical power of their example. They must patronize eloquence, seek for it, place it in their pulpits, call for it, and rely upon it. Nepotism, the curse of the church, must be no more. The generous instincts of the people are longing for the change, and the voice which summons eloquence from its long torpor will summon the people to a moral insurrection.

The critical value of a volume which gives such details in such a spirit must be comparatively unimportant; the merit of the authorship is eclipsed by the moral; but it is only due to the author, (the reverend brother of Godfrey Massy,) to acknowledge it as ingenious and interesting, often eloquent, and always animated; at once an honourable tribute to the pious spirit which has gone to its rest, and a striking evidence of the ability which has given that tribute for our instruction, our respect, and our example.

over from these, he fell upon the Lamentations, and in his indolent dejection, he could not bring himself to open the book at another place. Besides, he had a sort of superstition as to the part of the Bible at which the hand opens it being that providentially designed for perusal,— though he would not, perhaps, have confessed to a weakness he could not rationally justify. He gave it up at last; and, putting his hand in his pocket, pulled out the old rusty key, which was the sole legacy of his aunt Trumperant, and laid it upon the table to look at it.

As he gazed upon this suggestive token, the tranquillizing influences round him the removed voices of the children-the monotonous drip

from the slates the distant ticking of the clock-the crackle of the crisp cinders in the grate, began to have their effect, and insensibly to float him away from the external world into a less real one. His mind began to slip as it were upon the rail of thought. The connexion was not quite severed, however, but that intermediate state was induced, which was, as it had often proved before, one of soft and sweet hallucination. The deep markings and trenchings with which advancing years had been defining objects in his soul, like lines in his face, became gradually obliterated, and the sweet and rosy roundness of a vanished prime re-enchanted life. Feelings long unfeltassociations long dissevered-nay, scenes long forgotten, moved back once more across the disc of his memory, while the sounds and the objects about him, instead of dispelling the charm, accommodated themselves to its play, and lent their aid to realize the illusion. As the trance approached the confines of slumber, these soundings fetched further down into vanished epochs, wherein childhood re-appeared, with its vague antennæ put forth into an untried element of being, and its wings uncased for a flight towards all glory and all beauty.

While Twiller hung thus suspended between the Past and the Present-the substantial world and the world of shadows-he was conscious of a definite influence exercised by occasional disturbances of the visionary atmosphere in which he was floating. The slightest sound less monotonous than the rest-the slightest flicker of the even light of the fire, had the double effect of raising him a certain distance towards waking consciousness, and at the same time of restoring him a certain length towards the existing and habitual sensations of his present life. He was poised apparently in space and floating in time at the same moment. Disturbance drew him towards the surface of the one and towards the shore of the other by the same process. Repose wafted him back into both.

All this he was awake enough to be conscious of: and the consciousness was ineffably sweet. He would fain have basked in that intercalary paradise till doomsday.

He started up-and all had vanished. And now he began to think of the philosophy of the matter.

What is this experience, contrary to all experience? This expansion where I should have anticipated contraction? This invigoration, where all analogy would have pointed to prostration? It cannot be reasoned upon from that plane of nature in which our ordinary faculties are cast. Were it a single experience, it would be a mystery, and nothing more. But as forming a unit among several, may I not collect from the isolated sources around me certain faint indications which can be made to harmonize with this mystery of mine? Can I not group strange, anomalous, and paradoxical relations of individuals into congruity with it?

Revelations are generally laughed out of court. And so they should be, as a rule. Great corroboration ought to be required when a thing is asserted which our reason refuses to accredit to our belief.

Let a body of us assemble and discuss points of this nature, a thousand to one we agree, as the French savans did in Mesmer's case, to repudiate the vain notion with scorn. And we are accounted the wiser for so doing. Perhaps we really are so ; because the argument Hume urged against miracles here tells with tenfold effect; viz: that the universal experience of maukind, testifying to a particular course of nature, overweighs all partial evidence of a departure from it in any particular instance. With tenfold effect, I saytwelvefold would be more accurate, since, instead of the disciples it is here a single individual, whose testimony is to be placed in the scale against the whole world.

Nevertheless, as in religion, so in nature, vast truths may lie faint and nebulous on the confines of human vision, which it is not intended that man should reclaim and realize, until he has fashioned for himself those mighty engines of speculation, which the united labour of countless intellects for countless years gradually constructs out of the materials scattered up and down throughout the universe.

If a person state to me a dream, I laugh at it as a matter of course. Should it be my child, I take care

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duly to inform him, through the medium of metaphor, that dreams are ideas got adrift and running foul of each other-runaway horses of the brain-truant children of thought, 'begot of nothing but vain fantasy,' -and so forth. But I have had my own dreams, nevertheless, which were not such disjointed fragments of waking sensations, and were not so wholly unaccredited in their mission.

So of these strange retro-revelations. All the reasoning of wisdom could not accomplish more than to prevent my holding cheap the mental organization of the man, who, himself uninitiated in the matter by experience, should refuse to listen to me while I talked to him about it.

What has once been the object of sensation or reflection is never lost. Whenever the idea recurs to the mind, it is accompanied with the consciousness that it has been stored there ever since its first admission. This conscious recurrence is called memory. But though the thought should never be reproduced, it not the less exists in those unseen storehouses of past ideas. For the sake of order, we are restricted while waking from extracting these ideas otherwise than singlywe use them one by one. But this is not a faculty, it is only the restriction of one. Now, though to have a faculty added is what we have no right to speculate upon, and what we can hardly conceive of, yet to have a restrictive clog taken off an existing faculty, may easily be imagined. The sensations experienced in half-sleep seem to point more immediately to this indelible property of ideas. But they point beyond it. They exhibit, imperfectly, a fixed law of return; and moreover countenance the simultaneous presence of two or more ideas in the mind. Look what music makes out of several ideas harmonized!

Now, bearing this in view, I turn to certain records of individual experiences under unusual circumstances. Putting out of sight, as not sufficiently established, the phenomena of mesmerism, I find the experience of persons under the influence of certain diseases-and, still more, that of those who have approached the confines of death and been revived-corroborating my own, and showing increased and multiplied and complicated powers of mental

reclaration, such as would never have been anticipated or divined by a process of natural reasoning. The weakening of the external senses and of the power of the will over the reflective faculties, instead of dulling those senses, and dimming those faculties, has expanded both, and revealed the existence of new energies in their constitution. The last consciousness in strangling is said to be that of ineffable delight, derived from the idea of colour. In drowning, the latest conception is that of sweet and calm sunshine, wholly transcending the reality of experience. A man of eminence has described his sensations, when hard at death's door from the same cause. He seemed to go over the whole experience of his life in a few minutes; the ideas passing with inconceivable rapidity, yet without confusion. In like manner, my friend Lorimer, whose integrity equals his talents, has detailed to me the symptoms and sensations of death by drowning, all the forms of which he went through, with the accompanying phenomena of beautiful visions and celestial repose, though he was told afterwards that he had never ceased to struggle.

If it be true, as has been argued, that organization is necessary to consciousness and models thought, then organic changes may affect thought at its radicating point, and produce any conceivable-or inconceivable-combinations; as organic lesions do more or less completely derange, or dis-arrange, or re-arrange that existing arrangement in individuals, called their reason.

The decay of the faculties is nothing more than the want of power to marshal the array of thoughts and ideas within-it is akin to a natural feebleness of memory; but neither of them touches the mind itself, in its identity and essential permianence. This deficiency of memory may increase to imbecility-this decay may end in death-but not the more does either affect the mind within. The cloud becomes a veilbut behind it is still the mind.

Not so the influence of partial or complete slumber-of some diseasesof certain injuries-of starvation--of keen frost-of romantic heights-of opium-of the supreme hour-of ecstasies and the revelations of genius.

These have nothing to do with the medium; they go straight to the mind itself, and affect it at its source. Thus, in its ordinary use, the eye occupies itself about ordinary objects, has its season of perfection, and wears out. Pressure, or a blow, is needed to show self-generated light, and to raise the organ from a planet to a sun.

Is it possible that our human identity, like that of the earth, may have been carried forward from an ante-existing period? Some things favour the conjecture. We find our present history occasionally written over an older, like a palimpsest. Everybody has felt this; we look into a pit, and see a surface reflecting ourselves. The veil is impenetrable, except at such periods-just as impenetrable as the history of fossil life, in which we have to argue up to an animal from a jaw-bone, or a fishscale.

If such were so, then the removal of the impediments imposed upon us all, and which form the condition of our waking life, would possibly bring together the extremities of an existence extending from remote eras to the present, and set the wisdom, knowledge, power, and importance of the whole period quivering through us, as in the galvanic circle.

And truly, the rising up of long prostrate intelligences before death, seems to strike in this direction. What else can mean the lucidity of expiring lunacy, so common as scarcely to attract notice? What, the ineffable ravishments of prosaic souls in the last article of dissolution? What, but the rending away of an impediment, by an operation too violent for the bodily organization to survive? In this sense the words of the poet of contemplation alone become intelligible,

legible are mysteries! I verily believe a man born blind might dream colours, landscape, the human countenance ! Locke, everybody knows, is wrong. Number, and ideas of that class, are connate with the mind itself. But I go farther, and believe that the idea of every great natural external truth is prefigured in the mind. Perhaps, indeed, that of all internal truths also. But as some of those ideas are afterwards introduced by the external senses, or by reflection acting upon ideas so introduced, they remain there by virtue of the later title, in which the original becomes merged,-whereas those which are not, if they are developed in any of the perternatural ways enumerated, are recognised at once as of a peculiar nature, and marvelled at accordingly.

I dreamed that I wandered, wayworn and dejected, through the wilderness of the world. For me the vain frivolities of life failed of their usual charm-they were powerless to satisfy the restless yearnings of my soul. I sighed for the waters of a purer and more pellucid fountain, and looked upon the little shifting objects which interested the travel lers I met, lers I met, as so many grains of worthless sand.

Through this unsatisfying waste it was my punishment to think I beheld the marks of vague meaning, like those mysterious objects seen amidst the plains of Thebes, sitting over the sepulchral past, with its secrets passing round and round them, in bands of hieroglyphics, like the swathings of mummies. I fancied-and groaned as I fancied it,-that I was an alien from the general confidence of nature, as if I were not worthy to be trusted with truths which I could, nevertheless, discern the existence of in every leaf, pebble, and worm about me.

Against this interdict I strove fiercely and long. Aspirations, efforts, strivings, wrestlings, had succeeded each other, until my life had become one eternal war against its destiny. First fatigue, then dejection, then hopelessness came and fastened upon me. Slowly I lay down under the weight of my evil genius, while weak visions of things beyond my reach flitted ever and anon across my eyes, as vultures flap their wings in the very face of the expiring camel, whose

bones are destined to whiten upon the track of the caravans to Mecca.

A power was spoken of, which imparted the knowledge of secrets to the soul. I scoffed at it; for I knew that every human force had been brought into play in my own instance, in vain. It was with a gloomy joy I felt my power to expose the delusion ;something it was to see that there was a leaven of disappointment thrust amongst mankind, which would in time work its way in despair, dismay and ruin.

Some constraining force though my dream is here difficult to read; I thought it was the importunity of one of my own family-prevailed with me to submit myself to the influence of this power. But first I was shown all the common puzzles of mankind-the books-manuscriptslegends carvings-inscriptions:the hills caverns-cataracts, and seas, that make this world a mystery to us all-one by one they were passed under my eyes, and, as I shook my head, were placed each to the store of things unread-and unreadable.

My soul became conscious of an intense outgoing of love towards it, once or twice, as a fly is recovered by the breathing of a compassionate child; at last, my brain turned within me; and, when I looked again, the change had taken place.

Here all language fails-for what I dreamt of was, I feel, the new sense. In its effects it may partly be conceived of, even from the humble level of these waking capacities of ours, as the shadows cast across the surface of the moon reveal the altitudes of its mountains. A glance at the mysteries I had been surrounded with at once enlightened me-with amaze I saw that they arrayed themselves into order and symmetry, and had become not only legible, but lustrous. A spirit of intelligence had preached over the dry bones, and prophesied unto the wind, and commanded that they should live, and they stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Harmony, beauty, and utility no more hid themselves away in the heart of the Universe, as now, but blazed upon its forehead. The enigma of Life was solved-Truth cast off its disguise, and re-ascended the everlasting throne. Mercy and Peace sat,

its supporters, on either hand; and the Trinity of Nature was complete.

Of this truth and this nature I had become at once an emanation and a part. As such I held the key of all secrets-I unlocked them at pleasure. Nothing baffled my research. An exaltation of being, beyond all pride, accompanied this. The inscriptions on monuments and medals, the lore of libraries, questions of ooscure archæology, intricate policy, and subtle casuistry,-the annals of the earth, and the chronicles of the heavens, lay before me like an open book in my mother tongue. Every ugly sophism under which dark deeds had been done and justified was dragged forth into the day, slain like an unclean beast, and cast upon the dunghill. The world assumed one multiform yet uniform expression - the changeful harmony of a beautiful

countenance.

all

With the upburst of light upon outward things upshone within me the burning reflection of all, the orient of that love I had dreamed about and yearned after in melancholy ecstasies, before I was in love with woman.

The waters of Palmyra to the bitter fountain of the deser, - such seemed this love to that.

I am not able to recall the object of it, even in imagination. It is one of the wonders of the memory, that a mighty thought of bliss does not rest steadily upon it; when the angel descends, these waters are troubled. The beloved face is the hardest of all to retrace during absence.

I know this alone, that the genius of early Greece never in its most rapturous flights imagined into being any form or countenance more faultless-that the winding of rivers had lent its motion to that form-that the cherub of the mercy-seat had imparted its expression to that countenance. Terrible as an army with banners was the power of its spell. might of its loveliness was as the arrowy sun upon the unwinking eyetoo much for what was made for it.

The

Yet was it not too vast for the human heart. It entered under that lowly door, as meekly as a man of God stoops to visit the homestead of the poor. It made itself part of all the little sympathies it found there, -in its griefs mingling tear with tear,