1. I.
In its various workings, how independent mind ever
is of matter. Not so when the proposition is reversed.
The scheme which is perfected with consummate art in
the silence and seclusion of the closet is made fruitless
when it depends for development upon mere thews and
sinews; and the genius of the philosopher is hourly
called upon to lament, more and more, the weakness of
humanity, when it beholds its inadequacy to the execution
of those divine conceptions which arise from intense
thought and daring imagination. Yet the mind
of man, though mortified with its nonperformance, is
never so well assured of its own immortal destiny as
when it discovers the incapacity of its earthly agents in
the prosecution of its thousand purposes.
How various, too, are the forms of mental independence!
With what a noble profligacy has the Deity provided
men to be free of each other! Thought is so
various, that the mind of one man need never encroach
upon the boundaries and the province of another; and
millions shall so work in their several stores of speculation
and invention, yet never penetrate into the empire,
nor disturb the creations, of their neighbours. The
conspirator shall toil in the overthrow of the sovereign,
who, with a thought equally, if not more active, shall
labour, at the same moment, for the eternal bondage of
the conspirator. The rebel and his ruler shall in the
same hour meditate their several schemes of subjection
and revolt, yet no divine instinct shall enable the one to
conceive the subject-matter of his enemy's deliberation.
It was thus that, while Pelayo with a proper boldness,
and Lord Oppas with his natural and beloved
cunning, toiled together, and framed their plans of revolt
against King Roderick, that monarch, though troubled
in a thousand ways with his cares of empire and his
plans of tyranny, never once suspected the existence of
such a conspiracy. Nor did the conspirators, in turn,
ever once conjecture that a greater power than their
own was at work, arraying itself, and arising, by which
Roderick should fall without effort of theirs—a power
infinitely beyond their own, and which should, to a great
though still limited extent, control their best efforts for
the restoration of their country's freedom. Still less
did the ever-planning Oppas think that Pelayo, whom he
only sought to use, should soar in triumph when he
himself should be grovelling in the dust—should live in
glorious memories when his name would be allied only
with shame and degradation. And, to descend still
lower, little did the base spirit of the Hebrew Amri
imagine that the hour was so near at hand when the
prayer of his scorned and imprisoned sire would undergo
such direct and fearful realization—when the dreadful
words which his ears had heard from the lips of
Adoniakim, in the moment of his flight—“Jehovah,
God of Heaven, the just God and the perfect, may the
doom of the ungrateful son be sharp and sudden—may
it be felt, and may it be fatal!”—would so quickly meet
with the accord from above which they desired, and
descend in punishment upon his guilty head in their
utmost force. His heart had become insensible to its
fears: it teemed only with the vicious hopes of his lustful
imagination. His fancies only prefigured to his
mind his vengeance upon Melchior, and his possession
of the beautiful daughter, whose beauty was no longer
powerful to buy the devoted life of her sire. And the
miserable woman Urraca—little did she think, while she
was planning the fondest schemes of retirement, and,
possibly, of innocence, with the man upon whom she
had so madly concentrated her affections, that the hour
was approaching when all her hopes, like the affections
from which they had sprung into existence, would be
crushed and trampled into dust. Little did she dream
of that fearful mental revolution—that change in head
and heart—in thought and hope—which a few hours
were to bring about. She had lain down in a moment
of repose from sorrow—a short respite from the storms
which vice must ever bring along with it: she awakened
to their dreadful renewal—to the defeat of her
hope—to the annihilation of her dream of peace—to
despair of life—to a desire of death! Let us now
return to her.
