heads to the stature please us better than six, or why three or twelve heads seem to us monstrous.  If we say, in the latter case, because the head of the one is too small and of the other too large, we give no reason; we only state the fact of their disagreeable effect on us.  And, if we make the proportion of eight heads our rule, it is because of the fact of its being more pleasing to us than any other; and, from the same feeling, we prefer those statures which approach it the nearest.  Suppose we analyze a certain combination of sounds and colors, so as to ascertain the exact relative quantities of the one and the collocation of the other, and then compare them.  What possible resemblance can the understanding perceive between these sounds and colors?  And yet a something within us responds to both in a similar emotion.  And so with a thousand things, nay, with myriads of objects that have no other affinity but with that mysterious harmony which began with our being, which slept with our infancy, and which their presence only seems to have awakened.  If we cannot go back to our own childhood, we may see its illustration in those about us who are now emerging into that unsophisticated state.  Look at them in the fields, among the birds and flowers; their happy faces speak the harmony within them:  the divine instrument, which these have touched, gives them a joy which, perhaps, only childhood in its first fresh consciousness can know.  Yet what do they understand of musical quantities, or of the theory of colors?

And so with respect to Truth and Goodness; whose preexisting Ideas, being in the living constituents of an immortal spirit, need but the slightest breath of some outward condition of the true and good,—­a simple problem, or a kind act,—­to awake them, as it were, from their unconscious sleep, and start them for eternity.

We may venture to assert, that no philosopher, however ingenious, could communicate to a child the abstract idea of Right, had the latter nothing beyond or above the understanding.  He might, indeed, be taught, like the inferior animals,—­a dog, for instance,—­that, if he took certain forbidden things, he would be punished, and thus do right through fear.  Still he would desire the forbidden thing, though belonging to another; nor could he conceive why he should not appropriate to himself, and thus allay his appetite, what was held by another, could he do so undetected; nor attain to any higher notion of right than that of the strongest.  But the child has something higher than the mere power of apprehending consequences.  The simplest exposition, whether of right or wrong, even by an ignorant nurse, is instantly responded to by something within him, which, thus awakened, becomes to him a living voice ever after; and the good and the true must thenceforth answer its call, even though succeeding years would fain overlay them with the suffocating crowds of evil and falsehood.