Letters and Social Aims

alights on the bough, — then plunges into the air again, so the thoughts of Clod pause but for a mo ment in any form. All thinking is analogizing, and 't is the use of life to learn metoiiomy. The endless passing of one element into new forms, the inces sant metamorphosis, explains the rank which the imagination holds in our catalogue of mental pow ers. The imagination is the reader of these forms. The poet accounts all productions and changes of Nature as the nouns of language, uses them repre sentatively, too well pleased with their ulterior to value much their primary meaning. Every new object so seen gives a shock of agreeable surprise. The impressions on the imagination make the great days of life : the book, the landscape, or the per sonality which did not stay on the surface of the eye or ear, but penetrated to the inward sense, agi tates us, and is not forgotten. Walking, working, or talking, the sole question is how many strokes vibrate on this mystic string, — how many diame ters are drawn quite through from matter to spirit ; for, whenever you enunciate a natural law, you dis cover that you have enunciated a law of the mind. Chemistry, geology, hydraulics, are secondary sci ence. The atomic theory is only an interior pro cess produced, as geometers say, or the effect of a foregone metaphysical theory. Swedenborg saw gravity to be only an external of the irresistible