breathed into the nostrils of the animal the "breath of life,' and that it became "a living soul!"

Now, this was the crowning act of the six days' work. And man, the sublimation of material forms, alone was trusted with that awful gift-"the breath of life!" There is no mention of the "breath of life" when he made the beast, cattle, and creeping things. Yet in the common sense of these words, they too were given the breath of life.

No! He before says "God made man in his own image," that is, in his spiritual image for there can be no material likeness of spiritual existence, and these majestic words were used in reference to that spiritual resemblance of which the Eternal Life of God was the first feature.

The breath of life from his own lips was the bestowal of the eternity of his own spiritual being. A distinct, peculiar act! adding another element to the animal framed of the same dust of which the beast was made-interfusing a portion of Himself, of His own ultimate and indivisible essence, into the subtlest, purest organization of compounded matter: and man became a living soul, and that soul in the image of its Maker!

Between the atomic reasoner, and the reasoning man, there is a mighty stride. The shadow, though far away, is like, for one and the same principle governs in each. The stride between the attributes of God, so far as he has chosen to reveal them, and the attributes of the Living Soul in man, made after his own image, is vast too; but the shadow, though cast from afar-from out the abyss of Infinityis yet dim, is still like!

We cannot know how much more high those other attributes of which it has not pleased Him to instruct us may be; but we do know from His own words that the Creative Power is one of them, and Omnipresence and Foreknowl edge are others.

Then has not the Imagination, the Living Soul of man, in its own narrow sphere, the Creative power. Out of the chaos of

material imagery does it not body forth creations of its own, which had no being else, and with the reflex glories of this atom orb, people a universe? Does not the spread of thought in inappreciable time traverse all space like omnipresence? Has it not whilome cleft the dark-lined horizon of Now, and felt the Future shiver in cold prophetic beamings on its plumes?

Says not the sage Poet

"Imagination which from earth to sky,

And from the depths of human phantasy,
As from a thousand prisms and mirrors fill
The universe with golden beams!"

The universe! Aye, there is its peculiar home! Reason may deal with things of earth, cope with her physical laws, and teach the arm of flesh to wrest from their hard grasp shelter and food: but the rarer empyrean will not sustain its heavy plumes; when the

"Spirit, the Promethean spark,

has passed beneath them-then, possessed of an immortal vigor, the self-same drooping vans bathing in silver-exhalations at far starry fonts, take on the youth and splendor of eternity, and in long, weariless flights traverse infinity, questioning the seraphim, front to front, of God and mysteries.

Here is the mission of Imagination! We are of earth, earthy; and all its grosser essences thrice winnowed through life, through death, and through decay, meet once again in The I Am, without extension, weight, or form,-The ultimation of material being-buoyant and strong as angels are, and meet to bow with them before God's throne, and bide the awful Future.

And as Imagination here has wrought His will,-has faithfully tasked the poor wings of Reason lent it but for

Time, and delved and soared in every secret place where they might bear it, searching for knowledge of that will-so shall its wages be.

"Has she not shown us all

From the clear breath of ether to the small

Breath of new buds unfolding! From the meaning
Of Jove's large eyebrow to the tender greening
Of April meadows?"

Everything that we may know of our relations to the eternal cause duties as citizens of the star-lit extended universe-we must be taught by this imagination, which has been "since mind at first in characters was done," the chiefest theme of poets. In many a guise and strange impersonation, they have sung of it. The Hebrew first named it Job, and in that noble allegory showed how the prone Reason strove to drag it earthward, with tortures and wiles beset in vain its pure allegiance to the Lord of Hosts. Then through a long line of Prophet, Priest and King, these ancient chronicles have traced it down to the day of the Cæsars; and here they showed how the Prince of Spiritual Life might blend himself with matter, and become incarnate through a Virgin!-that the lowlier essence of himself imprisoned here might learn to love, to hope, and to endure! The less favored nation symboled its lower and fanciful attributes as Dryad, Fawn and Nymph:

A beautiful, though erring faith, is't not?
Which populates the brute insensate earth
With beamy shapes, the ministers of love
And quaintest humors!

Or, in the sublime myth of the Greek Prometheus, who wrestled defiant with the Gods, and defied them, through torments without name, to quell that spark of their own life he won from heaven for his race.

To overlook the ages, what is the Prometheus of Shelley but an impersonation of the Soul-of Imagination, warring with the great powers of evil, who curse it with a body. The Rock, Animal Life-Reason, the Chain-and fell Disease, the Vulture; and when the Demons drove the Vulture off that they might be refreshed with taunting him, the fearfulest image of fierce torture they could conjure was

"Thou thinkest we will live through thee one by one
Like Animal Life? And though we can obscure not
The Soul which burns within-that we will dwell
Beside thee, like a vain loud multitude,

Vexing the self-content of wisest men:

That we will be dread thought beneath thy brain,
And foul desire round thine astonished heart,
And blood within thy labyrinthine veins,
Crawling like agony!"

Poets have writ no cumbrous tomes, nor heaped dull dogmatisms mountain high, to awe the world; but they have felt all truths, and written them just as they felt, and called them too by universal names in scorn of pedant nomenclature. They leave it to the drudging scholiast to classify; but under one name in every tongue they have synonymed Imagination and the Soul. Without a thought of school-men's terms, they have felt them to be one, and so inscribed them. Aye! and so they are! And our theory is but a gleaning from "the chronicles of wasted Time," of " what their antique pen would have expressed!"

"Spirit of Nature! thou

Life of interminable multitudes !

Soul of those mighty spheres

Whose changeless paths through Heaven's
deep silence lie!

Soul of that smallest being,

The dwelling of whose life

Is one faint April gleam!"

If this be true, then have we been right to regard the earth as a living revelation, and the dumb trees, and stocks, and stones, articulate language. But like that other Holy Revelation, the types and symbols here must be devoutly studied, with a pious and earnest zeal.

Though, perhaps, not very strictly pious in the common acceptation, zeal enough has not been wanting. Unconsciously, our translations-occasional glimpses of the sense which visited us--began to assume definiteness and connection; the indigested chaos of rude forms to take on order; and before we were aware, an absorbing idea had possessed us. The result of all our readings might then be summed up under the single head, "Life is one linked continuous chain, from, what we can know of God, to the atom ;" and patiently we continue to delve among the rocks, the shells, the bugs, all creeping things, the flowers, the birds, the brutes, and arrowy fishes, to see if we may trace these links distinctly to the bounds of We think we can!

sense.

Then comes the inquiry-if this linked gradation be a material law, the law of forms, may it not apply also to the immaterial essence which in such varied phases constitutes the life-the soul of these? Here we meet with the hoary dogmatisms of the schools, and are rebuffed. Here we veil our eyes in humility before such names as Bacon, Locke, Hume, Beattie, Brown. We reverence these high Priests in the temple of the Most High! But reverence need not be blind. They say Reason and Instinct are altogether unlike; that Imagination is a mere faculty or adjunct of Reason, and Reason is the supremest function of the mind. How dare we think or say otherwise? We do not do it daringly, we do it humbly, inquiringly. We say we cannot help it that our eyes will not sec as theirs have. Our's are poor, weak visuals at the best, and but that there is something curious in the obstinacy of the hallucinations they have persisted in all our lives long, we should not presume to trouble any one