that is, without thinking of a whole.  Is this impossible?  Is it altogether out of experience?  We have already shown (as we think) that no unmodified copy of actual objects, whether single or multifarious, ever satisfies the imagination,—­which imperatively demands a something more, or at least different.  And yet we often find that the very objects from which these copies are made do satisfy us.  How and why is this?  A question more easily put than answered.  We may suggest, however, what appears to us a clew, that in abler hands may possibly lead to its solution; namely, the fact, that, among the innumerable emotions of a pleasurable kind derived from the actual, there is not one, perhaps, which is strictly confined to the objects before us, and which we do not, either directly or indirectly, refer to something beyond and not present.  Now have we at all times a distinct consciousness of the things referred to?  Are they not rather more often vague, and only indicated in some undefined feeling?  Nay, is its source more intelligible where the feeling is more definite, when taking the form of a sense of harmony, as from something that diffuses, yet deepens, unbroken in its progress through endless variations, the melody as it were of the pleasurable object?  Who has never felt, under certain circumstances, an expansion of the heart, an elevation of mind, nay, a striving of the whole being to pass its limited bounds, for which he could find no adequate solution in the objects around him,—­the apparent cause?  Or who can account for every mood that thralls him,—­at times like one entranced in a dream by airs from Paradise,—­at other times steeped in darkness, when the spirit of discord seems to marshal his every thought, one against another?

Whether it be that the Living Principle, which permeates all things throughout the physical world, cannot be touched in a single point without conducting to its centre, its source, and confluence, thus giving by a part, though obscurely and indefinitely, a sense of the whole,—­we know not.  But this we may venture to assert, and on no improbable ground,—­that a ray of light is not more continuously linked in its luminous particles than our moral being with the whole moral universe.  If this be so, may it not give us, in a faint shadowing at least, some intimation of the many real, though unknown relations, which everywhere surround and bear upon us?  In the deeper emotions, we have, sometimes, what seems to us a fearful proof of it.  But let us look at it negatively; and suppose a case where this chain is broken,—­of a human being who is thus cut off from all possible sympathies, and shut up, as it were, in the hopeless solitude of his own mind.  What is this horrible avulsion, this impenetrable self-imprisonment, but the appalling state of despair? And what if we should see it realized in some forsaken outcast, and hear his forlorn cry, “Alone! alone!” while to his living spirit that single word is all that is left him to fill the blank of space?  In such a state, the very proudest autocrat would yearn for the sympathy of the veriest wretch.