OR, “A KANTITE’S” FLIGHTS AT AN EXORDIUM.

FLIGHT THE FIRST.

He who widely, yet ascensively, expatiates in those in-all-ways-sloping fields of metaphysical investigation which perplex whilst they captivate, and bewilder whilst they allure, cannot evitate the perception of perception’s fallibility, nor avoid the conclusion (if that can be called a conclusion to which, it may be said, there are no premises extant) that the external senses are but deceptive media of interior mental communication.  It behoves the ardent, youthful explorator, therefore, to ——­, &c. &c.

FLIGHT THE SECOND.

In the Promethean persecutions which assail the insurgent mentalities of the youth and morning vigour of the inexpressible human soul, when, flushed with AEolian light, and, as it were, beaded with those lustrous dews which the eternal Aurora lets fall from her melodious lip; if it escape living from the beak of the vulture (no fable here!), then, indeed, it may aspire to ——­, &c. &c.

FLIGHT THE THIRD.

If, with waxen Icarian wing, we seek to ascend to that skiey elevation whence only can the understretching regions of an impassive mutability be satisfactorily contemplated; and if, in our heterogeneous ambition, aspirant above self-capacity, we approach too near the flammiferous Titan, and so become pinionless, and reduced again to an earthly prostration, what marvel is it, that ——­, &c. &c.

FLIGHT THE FOURTH.

When the perennial Faustus, ever-resident in the questioning spirit of immortal man, attempts his first outbreak into the domain of unlimited inquiry, unless he take heed of the needfully-cautious prudentialities of mundane observance, there infallibly attends him a fatal Mephistophelean influence, of which the malign tendency, from every conclusion of eventuality, is to plunge him into perilous vast cloud-waves of the dream-inhabited vague.  Let, then, the young student of infinity ——­, &c. &c.

FLIGHT THE FIFTH.

Inarched within the boundless empyrean of thought, starry with wonder, and constellate with investigation; at one time obfuscated in the abysm-born vapours of doubt; at another, radiant with the sun-fires of faith made perfect by fruition; it can amaze no considerative fraction of humanity, that the explorer of the indefinite, the searcher into the not-to-be-defined, should, at dreary intervals, invent dim, plastic riddles of his own identity, and hesitate at the awful shrine of that dread interrogatory alternative—­reality, or dream?  This deeply pondering, let the eager beginner in the at once linear and circumferent course of philosophico-metaphysical contemplativeness, introductively assure himself that ——­, &c. &c.

FINAL FLIGHT.