expect, as a thing of course, to have less religion under the disadvantages there; but resolve with help to have more-a feeling more ardent, and more enlightened views concerning God's truth in general.

Such were the feelings and intentions with which my son became a student in the University of Halle, in 1846. He highly valued the theological lectures of Professor Müller. He enjoyed the friendship of Professor Tholuck. The pictures of German life with which he then became familiar were deeply interesting to him at the time, and not less so in the after-thoughts of other days. Here is one of those pictures :

December 21st, 1846.-Halle. Some days ago, a student died here. He was about twenty-two, reading for the law; his disorder a nervous fever. Yesterday he was buried, and the spectacle was certainly an imposing one. A white coffin of carved wood, ornamented with wreaths, and with the cross swords laid on the top, was borne on the shoulders of men in long black cloaks and cocked hats; then followed a band playing solemn music; then a long train of students, the seniors of the student corporations, with their drawn swords, white gauntlets, white scarfs, and plumes in their caps; and in the rear a small body of the volunteer troops. When we came to the grave, the swordsmen surrounded it in the first row, and Tholuck, who was there in his gown and doctor's cap (exactly like the pictures of Martin Luther), gave a short address. Among other things, he said—‘The grave is but a little hill, yet from it how small do the great affairs of life look-how great the small!' As the coffin was lowered, the instruments sent forth some of the saddest, softest, most sweetly melancholy tones I ever heard. We then sang, all of us, a few words-the clods were thrown upon the coffin, and the ceremony was over. There was something to me inexpressibly mournful and beautiful about the whole scene which I shall never forget. The student here is not buried as every one else is buried, but with an honour peculiar to himself. But I wondered where his soul was, and thought of the sorrow of those to whom he was dear.

Nothing came to my knowledge then, in regard either to the piety or the orthodoxy of my son, to cause me to regret his residence in Germany. But I have since been made aware that the mental atmosphere of Halle, and in some measure, probably, the complete separation from those genial and domestic relationships in

which he had grown up, to which he was there subject, was not favourable to his religious peace. His mind fell under the influence of a vague spiritual restlessness, discontent, and gloom. It resembled, in some respects, the experiences through which he had passed in Lancashire, but it was in other respects different. It came from larger views of the mystery of our existence, and embraced many more sources of misgiving and sorrow. There are passages in his letters at this time, especially to the loved one who afterwards became the partner of his life, and who lives to mourn his loss, which disclose to us something of the troubled region through which he then passed.

November, 1846.—I scarcely know how the days go by. I live mentally like the earth, ever turning, now in light, now in shadow; at one time doing much, at another seeing so much to do that I do nothing; forming many plans of books -cobweb-fancies-mere brain-spinning, as the Germans call it; imagining sometimes our future life, and tossed on tumultuous feelings, waves of all sorts, and sizes, and strengths, and brightness, and darkness, with only the most distant possible sight of the haven caught only at intervals. And the thought fails not to come (how far just or not let the experience of every one decide), does not this shifting of shadows, and alternation of fears, and hopes, and restlessness, and vague aspiring, and despondency equally vague, does it not all come from the desire after happiness? And if a man could cease to wish to be happy, would he not be happy that instant? At least with a certain sort and fashion of happiness; but a something well worth having as the world goes, and which many a pining, downcast wretch would rejoice to obtain. It is not the truethat is in heaven-it is a graven image of it, however-an emanation, a picture, and what more can we expect? Therefore, the question, How may I be most happy? is sin, and comes to the same thing as, How may I be most wretched? In the search after the greatest good lie the seeds of the greatest evil. Some such philosophy might a solitary make, having a cavern on the sea-shore, and to whom the gloomy grandeur of the waves had imparted something of their own nature. Such a philosophy must a man alone at some time make for himself, to whom the outer world is the rocky cave, with its mere crust and water; and his own soul, with its limitless desires, its heaving commotion, or its deceitful slumber, the sea. Is not truth more likely to come to man's mind in converse with itself, and the truth about and above itself, than in company with his

fellows? Let any one take out the viper selfishness from his bosom, which has been warmed there so long (and if some of the heart comes away with it, let him not heed it), and let him, standing in the midst of change, and love, and hatred, say, none of these things move me― -they may come or go, they are the accident, not the essence of my nature; and let him regard all about him as not concerned with himself—shut his eyes quite to his own little, contemptible, and soon-to-be-forgotten earthly career, and say, 'What will happen to me I know not-what comes I care not-this only I know, that, whatever happens to myself, there abides the holy which I worship—the beautiful, unchanged, undiminished, whether I am happy or wretched. There are fellow-creatures to be served, and served they shall be, perhaps by me, certainly by some. I love them, and, if permitted, will bless them.' Would not such a man have come to a great pass, even the outpassing of the fretful and feverish desires that torment most of us? He would neither pine after fame, nor joy, nor love, but he would be love-he would be absorbed in what was beyond himself—he would lose his own identity in affection, in longing to be one with the purposes of God, to be a part of the building God's providence and grace build up: whether a stone near the foundation, dark, beneath the ground, in affliction or obscurity, or nearer one of the glorious pinnacles in the sunshine and light of men, it is not his concern, it is God's-some must be down beneath, and if that place God sees best for him, there he would soonest lie.

It might appear that such notions lean too much toward the quietism of some of the French Catholic writers; but yet when a man sees but a few fathoms into the pit of darkness, namely, his own heart, it becomes sober verity. This is not German philosophy—my reading has been lying lately another way; but this is how my own thoughts turn themselves, and work themselves, and keep me waking at night, and haunt me in the daytime. So I write as I am now thinking. But you will say such views of life lead to indifferentism-bring a frosty winter into life's very spring, and pull it to pieces as completely as you used to do our flowers. Exactly, I reply, the thing required—indifference— that is, to pull to pieces our own flowers for ourselves, to have no set form and shape of life-happiness which we will choose and have for our own, and say, I will have that or nothing, like a child with its toy. Then, and then only, are we free, and at least not so unhappy as we otherwise should be.

November 27th, 1846.-Pour moi, physically I am well, metaphysically no great things; it is such very hard work to keep out of a universal disgust of existence. It is a perpetual driving on a lee-shore, and no rounding the cape. Life becomes a sort of dolorous delight and magnificent misery; I know not what else to call it. The past is a garden with so many flowers that the nourishment they draw for their support takes all the moisture and productive power

VOL. I.

d

from the barren soil of the present: the future-that you know I always regard rather as a precipice than as a land of Beulah—a thing which, as it is not, may never be. If the past is not a torment, the future ought not to be a delusion. Take away the past and the future, and what is the present? A season wherein, when we do think, we are unhappy; when we do not think, unwise. Verily, threescore years and ten of this sort of thing ought to content any man. Every winter should come to each, asking him at the close of the year, 'Well, have you not had enough of it now?' And man stands up with his sins and his sorrows, his unsatisfied desires and contemptible aspirations, and thinks himself a hero because he can say 'No!' Every drowning kitten would say as much if it could speak. It is not heroism, only instinct. In overcoming the instinct there is certainly heroism. I never could understand that natural shrinking which theologians and casuists alike unite in saying a man must feel at the prospect of annihilation. They say that the thought rubs the soul against the grain, that it flies in the face of the first principles of our nature--that to believe in ceasing to be, must be, till you do cease to be, the utmost misery. I cannot perceive it. The reason for what they say is, I conceive, in the mistake that they imagine the soul as existing after it has been annihilated, and as regretting its own annihilation-that they cannot separate the idea of annihilation in their minds from that of an after-consciousness which shall be affected in some manner thereby, seeing that annihilation cannot be unpleasing to the annihilated, for there is no annihilated at all when he has been annihilated. So much for people's ideas on the subject. . I wish I could see in Scripture good

reason for believing in the annihilation of the lost.

December 3rd.-Life goes on with its succession of nights and days, and the perpetual rising and falling of the scales of light and of darkness, somehow. Time goes, and we go with it, but scarcely knowing how. To live is, to me, like being led blindfold through the streets of a great city—a confusion of sounds, the bustle of feet, and the rolling of vehicles—a sensation that some parts are lighter and others darker, that in some places the pavement is less smooth, in others more so-the crying and the laughing of children on either side, and the hum of the traffickers-the buyers and sellers of varieties—and that is all. It is of no avail to ask where we are. The conductor is a mute. We can only wait till the bandage shall be taken off our eyes: that will be when we can go no further. Then will the opened eyes be dazzled in a palace, or horror-struck by the sights that shall meet them in the eternal lazar-housethe hospital of sick souls for ever cureless. If a man says he has a purpose, it avails him nothing. He thinks he moves towards it, and hastens as though he were in the right way; yet he cannot be sure that he has not chosen a wholly wrong path. We may fall back for refuge on our motives, and say, come what

will, I mean well. But even of that, with the strange mixture of which we are composed, there is no certain judging. Many have said so in their hearts, and yet in their lives done evil, and served Satan when they thought they were serving God. How unspeakably important that we should have some data whereby to go. Yet what are such, and where to be found? A most happy thing truly to hear a voice where the roads part, 'This is the way in which thou shalt go.' But who can be sure as to whence the voice comes? We desire guidance, but we cannot know if we have it. We profess to cast aside our own will, but in the very moment have we our bias on one side or the other. A preponderance of motive this way or that-this grows and decides us—and we imagine we are directed. What is it but our own will, our own inclination, that is all the time active? Ask what we will, we feel it is we who must decide. To feel the importance of our actions paralyses action. We estimate the consequences somewhat to us and to others of the steps we take, and the very revelation of what human activity really is makes us fear to act. We are told not to be careful concerning the morrow-that cannot mean that we should not weigh well the steps we take in life-that we should not task our judgment to the utmost to act as will be best; and yet, when we do so, what does it avail when our knowledge is so circumscribed-when our self-deceptions are so many!

The con

But why do I trouble you with these reflections? Why perplex you with my perplexities, and write what might tend to throw over life, in your view of it, the same gloom which it increasingly possesses in my own? The truth is, that such thoughts are at present myself, and if I did not write them, it would be some other who wrote and not I. There comes the necessity for writing as I am. While it is the necessary consequence of solitude, of which I am now almost wholly the captive, to feed the soul on the bread and water of sadness, to make a tumult of fearful noises about the dungeon to scare away sleep, and to cause imaginations to become realities: with those whose life is happily passed in more of social activity these phantoms have no existence. sequence is so natural, that I have scarcely reason to complain. Every man left alone, who thinks to any purpose, must turn his thoughts inwards on himself. But, so doing, he must find there much that grieves and repels him. He begins to hate himself. Self-contemplation, the holy sister of selfishness, makes him, through a selfish process, hate that very self. But can any man really hate himself? A man may say he does-do we ever really do so? Scarcely. I think it more true to say that we despise ourselves; we love ourselves always, but self-contemplation, introspection, fills us with contempt for that which is still and necessarily dear to us.

Reader, hast thou never known anything of the self-contradiction,