ridge held the same view. Whether the opinion be true or false, it is not possible to prove the negative of this view, since the argument would imply the memory of the very thing alleged to be forgotten, and would therefore be self-contradictory.

We know, moreover, as a matter of positive experience, that the prominent and leading facts of life past are safely retained in the bosom of memory. They are often brought to our notice. What one spontaneously remembers, is quite sufficient to excite his wonder. If we could take distinct notice of every idea thus brought up in the course of a single day, so as to count the whole, the aggregate would doubtless amount to a great many millions. Every one at sight, without a moment's hesitation, can answer an indefinite number of questions in respect to the events of his own antecedent history. Indeed, all that we know, all that we have acquired by our other faculties, all that we can bring up from the regions of the past, our knowledge of the meaning of words, what we have seen, thought, and done, how we have felt, what has happened to us in the journey of life, in short, the total treasures of our intellectual being, portions of which we are so frequently using, are stored away in the capacious chambers of memory. The available contents of this faculty, those to which we have constant access, and which because they are so common, excite but little attention, evince the marvelous scope of power. They show the breadth, extent, and force of its grasp upon the past. Even the most common man may well be astonished at the vast resources of his own memory.

When, too, we observe that all our knowledges and experiences, all things that we have ever thought, felt, said, or done, are linked together by the laws of mental association; when we consider the number of these laws and the manner in which they may coöperate with each other; when we remember that no item of our past being is isolated or dissevered from other items; when we regard the whole of life's events as a long series of connected particulars from the moment that now is to the one in which we drew our first breath; when we take this view, the mind seems to be a vast sounding-board, ever ringing with the echo of itself, or, to change the figure, a complicated mechanism of keys, any one of which, being touched, may give forth a million of notes, which may again be multiplied into other millions, and so on, till the ear of thought shall have heard all that thought ever held. The laws of memory, alike irresistible and infallible, contain a most wonderful arrangement to transmit the soul along the corridors of the past, even to the remotest period. They are suited to lay open the broad field of its realities, and bring them under present view. One knows not where to fix the boundary of a process conducted and facilitated by such powerful laws.

The many instances of remarkable memory that we gather from history, are an instructive commentary upon the greatness of this power. The man, for example, who, being blindfolded, can play several games of chess at the same time, with as many different antagonists, keeping in his mind's eye the exact position of all the pieces in each of these games, exhibits a concentration and grasp of memory, which though not miraculous, seem perfectly astonishing. Themistocles, we are told, could call by their names the twenty thousand citizens of Athens. It is said of Cyrus, that he could repeat the name of evey soldier in his army. Hortensius, one of the orators of Rome, after sitting a whole day at a public sale, could enumerate from memory all the things sold, their prices, and the names of their purchasers. Ben Jonson could repeat all that he had ever written, and whole books that he had simply read. Seneca, the rhetorician, was able to repeat two thousand names read to him in the order in which they had been spoken; and on one occasion, two hundred unconnected verses having been pronounced in his hearing, he at once repeated the whole of them in a reversed order. Sir William Hamilton, who states these facts, also mentions the case of a young Corsican, who could, without the slightest hesitation, repeat "thirty-six thousand names in the order in which he bad heard them, and then reverse the order, and proceed backward to the first," and this too after the lapse of a whole year. It is said of Pascal, that he "forgot nothing of what he had read or heard or seen." There are persons who can recite every word of a lengthy discourse upon simply hearing it once. men have been characterized as walking-libraries, on account of the fullness and copiousness of their memories, having not only great power of retention, but also great facility in commanding and bringing forward, at a moment's warning, the extended and various treasures of their own minds. Such remarkable memories excite our surprise; yet it is well to bear in mind, that they are not miraculous, but simply natural in the sense of working according to those established laws that preside over the most common forms of memory. They show, in a very extraordinary manner, what may be done under the operation of these laws, more than suggesting the idea of a reserved and unexpended power of memory that is not ordinarily called into action.

Some

There are also many striking and peculiar cases of resuscitated knowledge, in which apparently extinct memories are suddenly restored, that lead to the same conclusion. A very remarkable example of this character is detailed by Dr. Abercrombie. He describes the case of a lady who, in the last stage of a chronic disease, was carried from London to a lodging in the country. There her infant daughter was taken to visit her, and after a short interview carried back to town. The lady died a few

days after; and the daughter grew up without any recollection of her mother, till she was of mature age. At this time she happened to go into the very room in which her mother died, without knowing it to have been so. She started back, on entering the room; and when a friend who was with her asked the cause of her agitation, she replied: "I have a distinct impression of having been in this room before, and that a lady who Îay in that corner, seemed very ill, leaned over me, and wept." This is certainly a very wonderful example of memory. Some secret spring in the soul of that woman was touched as she entered that room; and in the twinkling of an eye, her mind went back to a scene of her infancy a scene of mere impressions at the time, which had been latent up to the period of this occurrence, but which being recalled and brought into the field of her consciousness, in the maturity of her intelligence, at once expounded themselves. Her memory did this work. What then may not such a power do?

The numerous instances of quickened memory under the influence of physical causes, show what the mind may do under special and extraordinary exaltations of its activity. Persons on the brink of death by drowning are said to have unusually vivid visions of the past. A gentleman stated his own experience to me, at such a moment, in the following words: "My whole existence rushed before me in an instant; and it seemed to me that I saw every thing that I ever did. I seemed to see all the past in one view." Dr. Rush, who was a very critical observer of human nature, says: "Sometimes we observe in mad people an unexpected resuscitation of knowledge; hence we hear them. describe events, and speak in ancient or modern languages, or repeat long and interesting passages from books, none of which, we are sure, they were capable of recollecting in the natural and healthy state of their mind." He states the case of several Swedes and Germans, who, when dying, prayed in their native languages, though they had not used them for sixty years; indeed had forgotten them from early childhood. The Rev. Mr. Flint, an American clergyman, in his Recollections of the Valley of the Mississippi, tells us, that, being prostrated with a fever, and partially delirious, his memory was more than ordinarily exact and retentive, that he was able to repeat whole passages in the different languages which he had studied, with entire accuracy, and that he recited, without losing or misplacing a word, a passage of poetry which he could not so repeat after being recovered to health. His power of recollection received a wonderful impulse from his physical condition. Sir William Hamilton describes the case of a French lady, the Comtesse de Laval, who, being ill, spake, when asleep, in a language not a syllable of which did she understand when awake. The language was that of the

nurse who had the care of this lady when she was an infant; and the words were such as would be used in teaching an infant child to talk. All these words were wholly lost to her in health, and when awake; and yet they were not absolutely lost, as proved by the fact that being an invalid, she recalled them in the hours of sleep. Precisely how her mental nature was thus moved, we can not tell; yet the case is a very impressive example of resuscitated knowledge. The words which she had heard when a little child, and which she had entirely forgotten in adult life, flashed across the heavens of her spirit under the circumstances we have named, showing that though ideas may be long buried in the soul, they may nevertheless be recalled, being latent but not lost. A very striking case of the same character, given upon the authority of Coleridge, is that of a German servant-girl, who could neither read nor write, but who, during an attack of nervous fever, was incessantly talking Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, in each of these languages making coherent and intelligible sentences. When a child, this girl had lived in the family of a learned man, who was in the habit of walking up and down a passage in his house into which the kitchen-door opened, and reading with a loud voice in these several languages. Upon examining his favorite books, the very sentences uttered amid the delirious ravings of this humble domestic, were found to be contained therein; and this at once explained the marvel. The servant-girl had heard these sentences as a mere succession of sounds, attaching to them no meaning; and though in the ordinary condition of her mind they were wholly lost to her, yet when disease supervened and she became a maniac, some cord of her spirit was touched, and in an instant the long-forgotten sounds which she never understood were rolling from her lips. These sounds were in her memory sleeping but not dead, only waiting for an occasion to manifest their presence. Such a case conclusively shows that impressions once made upon the mind, may exist for an indefinite length of time in a latent state, and then be awakened and called forth into the field of our consciousness. Hence, as Coleridge forcibly says, it "contributes to make it even probable that all thoughts are in themselves imperishable; and that if the intelligent faculty should be rendered more comprehensive, it would require only a different and apportioned organization-the body celestial instead of the body terrestrial-to bring before every human soul the collective experience of its whole past existence. And this, this, perchance, is the dread book of judgment, in the mysterious hieroglyphics of which every idle word is recorded! Yea, in the very nature of a living spirit, it may be more possible that heaven and earth should pass away, than that a single act, a single thought, should be loosened or lost from the living chain of causes, with

all the links of which, conscious or unconscious, the free will, our absolute self, is coëxtensive and co-present."

Memory contemplated in the light of this reasoning and these cases, seems to be a vast empire in its contents, in its celerity to move with the vigor and speed of a seraph, in its survey of the past, to approximate almost to our idea of omniscience. It is truly a wonderful power; and if such be memory here, in this nascent state of our being, this mere infancy of our intellectual life, what may it not be and what may it not do, when, with our other faculties freed from a body of flesh and blood, it shall soar in progressive expansion and enlargement through the ages of a coming eternity? We can not well avoid the inference, that this faculty will rise to a scope, a compass, a certainty, precision and fullness of action, that will throw the most vivid light of thought back upon our anterior being. Retaining memory as an indestructible attribute of our spiritual nature-living, and lasting, and acting when earth-worms shall have eaten up our mortal bodies-this memory, too, careering in the broad and spacious kingdom of its own laws, and excited by the intense. stimulations of immortality-we surely shall not in these premises forget the world whence we came, or fail to recognize ourselves as the identical beings who, in that world, passed through the varying scenes of an earthly life. Our memories will and must forever keep up the connection of thought with our history. in time. We shall forever see it. Though past, it will be held in present view. No remoteness of time and no multitude of particulars will impair or perplex the exercise. We shall doubtless more perfectly recollect the life that now is, looking at it from eternity, than we can now recollect it, looking at it from time. Things that here have faded into absolute oblivion, may be seen and pondered there, painted upon the canvas of thought with the clearness of a solar beam, returning to be consciously realized in that life where

"Each fainter trace that memory holds

So darkly of departed years,
In one broad glance the soul beholds,
And all that was, at once appears."

The Bible regards the present and the future as merely two stages in the history of one and the same being, linking them together in the relation of time, and in that of moral dependence, implying too the continuance of the same mental faculties; and analogy coïnciding with this Bible view, and studying memory in the light of those impressive facts which are earthly, passes onward and upward to those greater facts which are future and eternal. Beginning thus with the data of experience, reason flies to the land of spirits, and there beholds the immortal Memorist in the full vigor and vastness of his endles career. "Remember,"