a single shadow over the heaven which it contrasts the dark river of his solemn and dread images sweeps the thoughts onward to Eternity. We have no desire even to look behind; the ideas he awakens are, in his own words, "the pioneers of Death;" they make the road broad and clear; they bear down those "arrests and barriers," the Affections; the goal, starred and luminous with glory, is placed full before us; every thing else, with which he girds our path, afflicts and saddens. We recoil, we shudder at life; and, as children that in tears and agony at some past peril bound forward to their mother's knee, we hasten, as our comfort and our parent, to the bosom of Death.

CONVERSATION THE SECOND.

L'S INCREASE OF ILLNESS-REMARKS ON A PASSAGE IN BACONADVANTAGES IN THE BELIEF OF IMMORTALITY-AN IDEA IN THE LAST CONVERSATION FOLLOWED OUT-A CHARACTERISTIC OF THE SUBLIME-FEELINGS IN ONE DYING AT THE RESTLESSNESS OF LIFE

AROUND.

WHEN I called on L——— the third day after the conversation I have attempted to record, though with the partial success that must always attend the endeavour to retail dialogue on paper, I found him stretched on his sofa, and evidently much weaker than when I had last seen him. He had suffered the whole night from violent spasms in the chest, and, though now free from pain, was labouring under the exhaustion which follows it. But nothing could wholly conquer

in him a certain high-wrought, rather than cheerful, elasticity of mind; and in illness it was more remarkable than in health; for I know not how it was, but in illness his thoughts seemed to stand forth more prominent, to grow more transparent, than they were wont in the ordinary state of the body. He had also of late, until his present malady, fallen into an habitual silence, from which only at moments he could be aroused. Perhaps now, however, when all his contemplations were bounded to a goal apparently near at hand, and were tinged with the grave (though in him not gloomy) colours common to the thoughts of death-that secret yearning for sympathy-that desire to communicate—inherent in man, became the stronger, for the short date that seemed allowed for its indulgence. Wishes long hoarded, reflections often and deeply revolved, finding themselves cut off from the distant objects which they had travailed to acquire, seemed wisely to lay down their burthen, and arrest their course upon a journey they were never destined to complete. "I have been

reading," said L, (after we had conversed for some minutes about himself)-" that divine work on 'The Advancement of Learning.' What English writer (unless it be Milton in his prose works) ever lifted us from this low earth like Bacon? How shrink before his lofty sentences all the meagre consolation and trite commonplace of lecturers and preachers,—it is, as he has beautifully expressed it, upon no‘waxen wings' that he urges the mind through the great courses of heaven. He makes us feel less earthly in our desires, by making us imagine ourselves wiser,-the love of a divine knowledge inspires and exalts us. And so nobly has he forced even our ignorance to contribute towards enlarging the soul-towards increasing our longings after immortality-that he never leaves us, like other philosophers, with a sense of selflittleness and dissatisfaction. With the same hand that limits our progress on earth, he points to the illimitable glories of heaven. Mark how he has done this in the passage I will read to you. As he proceeds in his sublime vindication

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of Knowledge, 'from the discredits and disgraces it hath received all from ignorance, but ignorance, severally acquired, appearing sometimes in the zeal and jealousy of divines: sometimes in the severity and arrogance of politicians; sometimes in the errors and imperfections of learned men themselves;'-proceeding, I say, in this august and majestical defence, he states the legitimate limits of knowledge, as follows:'first, that we do not so place our felicity in knowledge, as to forget our mortality; secondly, that we make application of our knowledge, to give ourselves repose and contentment, not distaste or repining; thirdly, that we do not presume, by the contemplation of Nature, to attain to the mysteries of God.' After speaking of the two first limits, he comes as follows to the last. And for the third point, it deserveth to be a little stood upon, and not to be lightly passed over; for if any man shall think, by view and inquiry into these sensible and material things, to attain that light, whereby he may reveal unto himself the nature or will of God, then indeed is