Page:The Campaner thal, and other writings.djvu/357

 and why must a storm agitate our affections before they can raise the highest rainbow of peace? Ah! for this reason it is—because all passions feel their object to be as eternal as themselves, and no love can admit the feeling that the beloved object should die. And under this feeling of imperishableness it is that we hard fields of ice shock together so harshly, whilst all the while under the sunbeams of a little space of seventy years we are rapidly dissolving.

DREAMING.

UT for dreams, that lay Mosaic worlds tessellated with flowers and jewels before the blind sleeper, and surround the recumbent living with the figures of the dead in the upright attitude of life, the time would be too long before we are allowed to rejoin our brothers, parents, friends: every year we should become more and more painfully sensible of the desolation made around us by death, if sleep—the ante-chamber of the grave—were not hung by dreams with the busts of those who live in the other world.

TWO DIVISIONS OF PHILOSOPHIC MINDS.

HERE are two very different classes of philosophical heads—which, since Kant has introduced into philosophy the idea of positive and negative quantities, I shall willingly classify by means of that distinction. The positive intellect is, like the poet, in conjunction with the outer world, the father of an inner world; and, like the poet also, holds up a transforming mirror in which the