be blessed."

_(e)_ "From the seeming nature of the human mind, as well as from the
evident imperfections in the administration of affairs, in both the
natural and moral worlds, there must be a retributive scene of
existence beyond the grave."

_(f)_ "I never hear the loud solitary whistle of the curlew in a
summer's noon, or the wild mixing cadence of a troop of grey plover
in an autumn morning, without feeling an elevation of soul like the
enthusiasm of Devotion or Poetry. Tell me, my dear friend, to what
can this be owing? Are we a piece of machinery, that, like the AEolian
harp, passive, takes the impression of the passing accident? Or do
these workings argue something within us above the trodden clod?"

_(g)_ "Gracious Heaven! why this disparity between our wishes and our
powers? Why is the most generous wish to make others blest, impotent
and ineffectual?... Out upon the world! say I, that its affairs are
administered so ill."

_(h)_ "At first glance, several of your propositions startled me as
paradoxical. That the martial clangour of a trumpet had something in
it vastly more grand, heroic, and sublime than the twingle-twangle of
a jew's-harp; that the delicate flexure of a rose-twig, when the
half-blown flower is heavy with the tears of the dawn, was infinitely
more beautiful and elegant than the upright stub of a burdock; and
that, from something innate and independent of all associations of
ideas--these I had set down as irrefragable orthodox
truths."[a]