ful mind as to unfit it for the common duties of life. Like Narcissus, the heart perishes for love of its own shadow. It becomes so acutely sensitive as to "die of a rose in aromatic pain;" or like the Sybarite, it cannot sleep, because a crumpled roseleaf lay beneath the pillow.

I have often thought that the secret of happiness may lie in this precept: "Take the good of life as it is, a divine gift, and not an agreeable deception;" when evil is in your path, search its cause, analyze its nature, and if you discover not that you have yourself to thank for it, at least you may prove that the evil itself is made up of mere trifles, and thus you will learn to be resigned.

And with the beauty and treasures of earth-if you possess them, enjoy them with a prudent and a grateful heart. If they belong to others, sigh not -pine not for them, but analyze them also, and you may find that the hope of their enjoyment was a phantom; for aggregated beauties are often made up of deformed or unlovely atoms.

I might illustrate my remarks by relating to you an episode of the life of my young friend Stanmore; from which I learned, with sorrow, that the heart may droop beneath its own excess of sensibility (a mystery to those who were strangers to its secret), and that the bosom of love may be self-blighted:

His existence was a withered hope, that, like the icicle in the cup of the early flower, freezes the life-spring in which it is so deeply imbosomed. In his mind was lighted a vision of Elysium, beyond what earth, with all its virtue and beauty, could give him a spectral Utopia. His life was a blank. He found not happiness, because he knew not contentment. He was the leader of many a forlorn hope in Spain, and fell in a midnight enterprise among the guerillas in the Sierra Morena.

:

Ev. And had the sword spared him, he would have died a moral suicide.

What folly, thus to chase a butterfly, instead of yielding to the virtuous influence of woman, which beyond aught else softens and ennobles man's heart, entrancing it in floods of human passion, which, with all its pains, yields happiness a thousand fold more than the maudlin sentiments of Rousseau, that, reducing love to a mere phantom, leave the lone heart to prey on its own sensibility.

Such was the romantic poet of Endymion, who for the phantom of his waking dreams gave up the study of that science which might have nursed and fortified a mind so soon chilled to death by the icy fingers of criticism. Erato was the mistress of John Keats; but while he wooed, he perished: like the Rosicrucian, who, to save the life of his lady, took the oath of celibacy, and thus lost her love forever. Even in the lecture-room of Saint Thomas's I have seen Keats in a deep poetic dream: his mind was on Parnassus with the Muses. And here is a quaint fragment which he one evening scribbled in our presence, while the precepts of Sir Astley Cooper fell unheeded on his ear:

"Whenne Alexandre the Conqueroure was wayfayringe in ye londe of Inde, there mette hym a damoselle of marveillouse beautie slepynge uponne the herbys and flourys. He colde ne loke uponne her withouten grete plesance, and he was welle nighe loste in wondrement. Her forme was everyche whytte lyke ye fayrest carvynge of Quene Cythere, onlie thatte yt was swellyd and blushyd wyth warmthe and lyffe wythalle.

"Her forhed was as whytte as ys the snow whyche ye talle hed of a Norwegian pyne stelythe from ye northerne wynde. One of her fayre hondes was yplaced thereonne, and thus whytte wyth

whytte was ymyngld as ye gode Arthure saythe, lyke whytest lylys yspredde on whyttest snowe; and her bryghte eyne whenne she them oped, sparklyd lyke Hesperus through an evenynge cloude.

Theye were yclosed yn slepe, save that two slauntynge raies shotte to her mouthe, and were theyre bathyd yn swetenesse, as whenne bye chaunce ye moone fyndeth a banke of violettes and droppethe thereonne ye sylverie dewe.

"The authoure was goynge onne withouthen descrybynge ye ladye's breste, whenne lo, a genyus appearyd-Cuthberte,' sayeth he, 'an thou canst not descrybe ye ladye's breste, and fynde a simile thereunto, I forbyde thee to proceede yn thy romaunt.' Thys, I kennd fulle welle, far surpassyd my feble powres, and forthwythe I was fayne to droppe my quille."

FANTASY FROM SYMPATHY WITH THE BRAIN.

"My eyes are made the fools o' the other senses.' "-Macbeth

ASTR. I marvel not, lady, that those pencilled brows do frown upon the ruthless scholar who thus dares to dismantle the fair realm of poesy, and bind the poppy, and the cypress, and the deadly nightshade with the myrtle and the laurel.

We shall have, ere long, a statute of lunacy against the poet and the seer; or, hapless, he will imprison thee, fair creature, within a cloven pine; and, like Prospero, I must break my wand and bury it certain fathoms in the earth, and, deeper than ever plummet sounded, drown my books. The pages of Ptolemy, and Haly, and Agrippa, and Lily will be but by-gone fables, and the meta

physics of the mighty mind will be controverted by the slicing of the brain and marrow with the knife of these anatomists. Nay, we must devoutly believe what they so learnedly give out, that frontal headaches in the locality of form, colour, and number, and, forsooth, in the organ of wonder too, often accompany spectral illusions, and that white or gray ghosts result from excited form and deficient colour !!

Martin Luther, who was a believer in special influence, quarrelled with the physician who referred its mystic signs to natural causes. I am not so un

courteous, yet express my wonder, Evelyn, at the confidence with which you presume to the discovery of a material reason and a cause for all the phenomena of our mysterious intellect.

Ev. And why should I not, dear Astrophel, if I search for and discover it in the studies of that sublime science, the meditation on which inspired Galen with this pious sentiment: "Compono hic profecto canticum in Creatoris nostri laudem."

Is it more profane to think that the Deity should speak to us through the medium of our senses than by the agency of a spirit? Recollect, I have presumed neither to enter deeply into metaphysical reasoning, nor to describe minutely the condition of the brain; and I have alluded but slightly to the supposed function of its varied structures. Lord Bacon has observed, "He who would philosophize in a due and proper manner must dissect nature, but not abstract her, as they are obliged to do who will not dissect her." Dissection, however, in its anatomical sense, has not, perhaps cannot, elucidate the coincidence of symptom and pathology in cases which so seldom prove fatal, and the causes of which may be so evanescent. Still, it is only by a combination of metaphysical argument and ana

tomical research, with the essential aid of analogy, that the phenomena and disease of mind can be fairly investigated.

In the important question of insanity, there is an error among the mere metaphysicians that is fraught with extreme danger-the abstract notion of moral causes being the chief excitement of mania. This error has led to that melancholy abuse of the coercive treatment and excitement of fear in a maniac, as if a savage keeper possessed the wondrous power of frightening him into his wits. Hear what the magniloquent Reil writes on this point: "The reception of a lunatic should be amid the thunder of cannon; he should be introduced by night over a drawbridge, be laid hold of by Moors, thrust into a subterranean dungeon, and put into a bath with eels and other beasts!"

And Lichtenberg, another moral philanthropist, sanctioned by the divine axiom, "the rod helps God," urges the employment of coercion and cruelty for this sublime psychological reason: that under the infliction of the lash and the cane "the soul is forced to knit itself once more to that world from which the cudgels come!" Think ye that these moralists, if not hoodwinked by false metaphysics, would have so closely copied the malevolence of an inquisitor or a devil?

We must believe that each illusive representation is marked by some change in some certain portion of the brain, the function of which bears a reference to the subject or nature of the illusion; it may be so minute as not to be recognised by our vision. Indeed, if the bodily sensations of every human passion be faithfully analyzed, it will be proved that there is an unusual feeling in some part, when even a thought passes through the mind, under these definitions: a thrill, a creeping, a glow,