"Think you, 'mid all this mighty sum
Of things forever speaking,
That noting _of itself_ will come,
But we must still be seeking?"

And again:--

"Nor less I deem that there are powers
Which _of themselves_ our minds impress;
And we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness."

These cases of infancy, reached at intervals by special revelations,
or creating for itself, through it privileged silence of heart,
authentic whispers of truth, or beauty, or power, have some analogy
to those other cases, more directly supernatural, in which (according
to the old traditional faith of our ancestors) deep messages of
admonition reached an individual through sudden angular deflexions of
words, uttered or written, that had not been originally addressed to
himself. Of these there were two distinct classes--those where the
person concerned had been purely passive; and, secondly, those in which
he himself had to some extent cooperated. The first class have been
noticed by Cowper, the poet, and by George Herbert, the well-known
pious brother of the still better-known infidel, Lord Herbert, (of
Cherbury,) in a memorable sonnet; scintillations they are of what seems
nothing less than providential lights oftentimes arresting our
attention, from the very centre of what else seems the blank darkness
of chance and blind accident. "Books lying open, millions of
surprises,"--these are among the cases to which Herbert (and to which
Cowper) alludes,--books, that is to say, left casually open without