while still unmoved, and the ravishing grace that dwells in it
during its endless changes and evolutions.

The upright figure of man produces, incidentally as it were, and
by the bye, another memorable effect. Hence we derive the power
of meeting in halls, and congregations, and crowded assemblies.
We are found "at large, though without number," at solemn
commemorations and on festive occasions. We touch each other, as
the members of a gay party are accustomed to do, when they wait
the stroke of an electrical machine, and the spark spreads along
from man to man. It is thus that we have our feelings in common
at a theatrical representation and at a public dinner, that
indignation is communicated, and patriotism become irrepressible.

One man can convey his sentiments in articulate speech to a
thousand; and this is the nursing mother of oratory, of public
morality, of public religion, and the drama. The privilege we
thus possess, we are indeed too apt to abuse; but man is scarcely
ever so magnificent and so awful, as when hundreds of human heads
are assembled together, hundreds of faces lifted up to
contemplate one object, and hundreds of voices uttered in the
expression of one common sentiment.

But, notwithstanding the infinite beauty, the magazine of
excellencies and perfections, that appertains to the human body,
the mind claims, and justly claims, an undoubted superiority. I
am not going into an enumeration of the various faculties and
endowments of the mind of man, as I have done of his body. The
latter was necessary for my purpose. Before I proceeded to
consider the ascendancy of mind, the dominion and loftiness it is