At the side of this vortex, which covers with deep oblivion the past, and impenetrable darkness the future, nature shudders and draws back, and the soul, with sinking heart, looks mournfully around upon this fair creation, and up to these beautiful heavens, and in plaintive accents demands, “Is there, then, no deliverance from this falling back into nothing?  Must this conscious being cease—­this reasoning, thinking power, and these warm affections, their delightful movements?  Must this eye close in an endless night, and this heart fall back upon everlasting insensibility?  O, thou cloudless sun, and ye far-distant stars, in all your journeyings in light, have ye discovered no blessed intelligence who called you into being, lit up your fires, marked your orbits, wheels you in your courses, around whom ye roll, and whose praises ye silently celebrate?  Are ye empty worlds, and desolate, the sport of chance? or, like our sad earth, are ye peopled with inhabitants, waked up to a brief existence, and hurried reluctantly, from an almost untested being, back to nothing?  O that there were a God, who made you greater than ye all, whose being in yours we might see, whose intelligence we might admire, whose will we might obey, and whose goodness we might adore!” Such, except where guilt seeks annihilation as the choice of evils, is the unperverted, universal longing after God and immortality.

[Footnote 8:  A Congregational clergyman, prominent, in the early part of this century, for his zeal and piety, and for the eloquence and originality of his sermons:  father of a numerous family distinguished in theology and literature.]

* * * * *

=_William Ellery Channing, 1780-1842._= (Manual, p. 480.)

From the Essay on Napoleon Bonaparte.

=_24._= CHARACTER OF NAPOLEON.

With powers which might have made him a glorious representative and minister of the beneficent Divinity, and with natural sensibilities which might have been exalted into sublime virtues, he chose to separate himself from his kind, to forego their love, esteem, and gratitude, that he might become their gaze, their fear, their wonder; and for this selfish, solitary good, parted with peace and imperishable renown.

His insolent exaltation of himself above the race to which he belonged, broke out in the beginning of his career.  His first success in Italy gave him the tone of a master, and he never laid it aside to his last hour.  One can hardly help being struck with the natural air with which he arrogates supremacy in his conversation and proclamations.  We never feel as if he were putting on a lordly air.  In his proudest claims, he speaks from his own mind, and in native language.  His style is swollen, but never strained, as if he were conscious of playing a part above his real claims.  Even when he was foolish and impious enough to arrogate miraculous powers and a mission from God, his language showed