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Untitled Article
The most deeply interesting adventures , the wildest vicissitudes , the most daring explorations , the mightiest magic , the fiercest cbnflicts , the brightest triumphs , and the most affecting catastrophes , are those of the spiritual world . Many a self-educated man
could tell a history , as full as that of Robinson Crusoe , of ingenious expedients and contrivances , to supply the deficiency of his mental furniture and resources ; and fascinating would be the narrative of the toil , the desperation ,, the inventions , and the perseverance of his solitary intellectual life . A poor gardener ' s boy in the Highlands of Scotland , such as Stone the mathematician ,
had quite as much to do for himself mentally , as must have been done for his physical support had he been shipwrecked on Juan Fernandez . And would not the history of Lord Bacon ' s rich and stately intellect , the showing how he built up its regal palace , and organized its powers , and conquered remote provinces to its dominion , and cultivated its various possessions , and overturned ,
first in himself and then for others , the ancient dynasties and despotisms beneath which reason had crouched , and founded a new order of things in the world of philosophy ; would not this be as great a theme as the battles of Alexander , the conquest of Darius , the invasion of India , the scenes of the temple in the Lybian desert , and of the banqueting hall in Babylon , the
founding of Alexandria , and the generation of a brood of kingdoms ? The faculty of description may be as efficiently exercised in conveying the conception of a state of mind as in imparting that of a group of figures or a landscape . The abasement of a mightv spirit , brooding over the wreck of character produced by its own mistaken daring , may be invested with all the touching sublimity
of the historical incident of Marius sitting amid the ruins of Carthage . The soul has its seasons , which may be sung with all theiv contrasted , yet connected phenomena , and with as many an episode to be naturally and gracefully interwoven , as the solar year . There isHn art , not less felicitous than that which produces characters like a Creator , and links events together like a providence , and makes its combinations tend to the premeditated result
like an overruling fate or destiny , in that which traces the growth of an individual mind , the influences upon it of things external , the powers unfolding themselves within it with all their harmonies and discords , the ties of association flowing hither and thither like the films of a spider ' s web , yet strong as iron bands , its prevailing tendencies and frequent irregularities , with all that makes it a microcosm , if it be not rather the world of matter that
is the microcosm , and that of mind , the true and essential universe alone worthy of observation and interest . Whoever may tell of * Loadon ; SmiaUwi and Otley , 1833 ,
Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), April 2, 1833, page 252, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2612/page/36/
