design or consciousness, from which some careless passer-by, when
throwing the most negligent of glances upon the page, has been startled
by a solitary word lying, as it were, in ambush, waiting and lurking
for _him_, and looking at him steadily as an eye searching the haunted
places of his conscience. These cases are in principle identical with
those of the _second_ class, where the inquirer himself cooperated,
or was not entirely passive; cases such as those which the Jews called
Bath-col, or daughter of a voice, (the echo [1] augury,) viz., where a
man, perplexed in judgment and sighing for some determining counsel,
suddenly heard from a stranger in some unlooked-for quarter words not
meant for himself, but clamorously applying to the difficulty besetting
him. In these instances, the mystical word, that carried a secret meaning
and message to one sole ear in the world, was unsought for: _that_
constituted its virtue and its divinity; and to arrange means wilfully
for catching at such casual words, would have defeated the purpose.
A well-known variety of augury, conducted upon this principle, lay in
the "Sortes Biblicae," where the Bible was the oracular book consulted,
and far more extensively at a later period in the "Sortes Virgilianae,"
[2] where the Aeneid was the oracle consulted.

Something analogous to these spiritual transfigurations of a word or
a sentence, by a bodily organ (eye or ear) that has been touched with
virtue for evoking the spiritual echo lurking in its recesses, belongs,
perhaps, to every impassioned mind for the kindred result of forcing
out the peculiar beauty, pathos, or grandeur that may happen to lodge
(unobserved by ruder forms of sensibility) in special passages scattered
up and down literature. Meantime, I wish the reader to understand that,
in putting forward the peculiar power with which my childish eye
detected a grandeur or a pomp of beauty not seen by others in some
special instances, I am not arrogating more than it is lawful for every