“I doubt the part you will see to-night will be more
than enough to satiate even your curiosity.” As he spoke he drew a tube
from his vest, and bid her apply it to her sight. The Indian obeyed him;
but, after gazing a moment, uttered the emphatic exclamation, “I am
there!--or are they here?” and sunk on the earth in a frenzy of delight. She rose again in a moment, and eagerly seizing the telescope, applied
it in a wrong direction, which disclosed merely the sea to her view, and
exclaimed sadly, “Gone!--gone--all that beautiful world lived and died
in a moment--all that I love die so--my dearest roses live not half so
long as those I neglect--you were absent for seven moons since I first
saw you, and the beautiful world lived only a moment.”

“The stranger again directed the telescope towards the shore of India,
from which they were not far distant, and Immalee again exclaimed in
rapture, “Alive and more beautiful than ever!--all living, thinking
things!--their _very walk thinks_. No mute fishes, and senseless trees,
but wonderful rocks(12), on which they look with pride, as if they were
the works of their own hands. Beautiful rocks! how I love the perfect
straitness of your sides, and the crisped and flower-like knots of your
decorated tops! Oh that flowers grew, and birds fluttered round you, and
then I would prefer you even to the rocks under which I watch the
setting sun! Oh what a world must that be where nothing is natural, and
every thing beautiful!--thought must have done all that. But, how
_little every thing is_!--thought should have made every thing
larger--_thought should be a god_. But,” she added with quick
intelligence and self-accusing diffidence, “perhaps I am wrong. Sometimes I have thought I could lay my hand on the top of a palm-tree,
but when, after a long, long time, I came close to it, I could not have
reached its lowest leaf were I ten times higher than I am. Perhaps your
beautiful world may grow higher as I approach it.”--“Hold, Immalee,”
said the stranger, taking the telescope from her hands, “to enjoy this
sight you should understand it.”--“Oh yes!” said Immalee, with
submissive anxiety, as the world of sense rapidly lost ground in her
imagination against the new-found world of mind,--“yes--let me
think.”--“Immalee, have you any religion?” said the visitor, as an
indescribable feeling of pain made his pale brow still paler. Immalee,
quick in understanding and sympathising with physical feeling, darted
away at these words, returned in a moment with a banyan leaf, with which
she wiped the drops from his livid forehead; and then seating herself at
his feet, in an attitude of profound but eager attention, repeated,
“_Religion!_ what is that? is it a new thought?”--“It is the
consciousness of a Being superior to all worlds and their inhabitants,
because he is the Maker of all, and will be their judge--of a Being whom
we cannot see, but in whose power and presence we must believe, though
invisible--of one who is every where unseen; always acting, though never
in motion; hearing all things, but never heard.” Immalee interrupted
with an air of distraction--“Hold! too many thoughts will kill me--let
me pause. I have seen the shower that came to refresh the rose-tree beat
it to the earth.” After an effort of solemn recollection, she added,
“The voice of dreams told me something like that before I was born, but
it is so long ago,--sometimes I have had thoughts within me like that
voice. I have thought I loved the things around me too much, and that I
should love things _beyond_ me--flowers that could not fade, and a sun
that never sets. I could have sprung, like a bird into the air, after
such a thought--but there was no one to shew me that path upward.” And
the young enthusiast lifted towards heaven eyes in which trembled the
tears of ecstatic imaginings, and then turned their mute pleadings on
the stranger. (12) Intellige “buildings.”

“It is right,” he continued, “not only to have thoughts of this Being,
but to express them by some outward acts. The inhabitants of the world
you are about to see, call this, _worship_,--and they have adopted (a
Satanic smile curled his lip as he spoke) very different modes; so
different, that, in fact, there is but one point in which they all
agree--that of making their religion a torment;--the religion of some
prompting them to torture themselves, and the religion of some prompting
them to torture others. Though, as I observed, they all agree in this
important point, yet unhappily they differ so much about the mode, that
there has been much disturbance about it in the world that thinks.”--“In
the world that _thinks_!” repeated Immalee, “Impossible! Surely they
must know that a difference cannot be acceptable to Him who is
One.”--“And have you then adopted no mode of expressing your thoughts of
this Being, that is, of worshipping him?” said the stranger.--“I smile
when the sun rises in its beauty, and I weep when I see the evening star
rise,” said Immalee.--“And do you recoil at the inconsistencies of
varied modes of worship, and yet you yourself employ smiles and tears in
your address to the Deity?”--“I do,--for they are both the expressions
of joy with me,” said the poor Indian; “the sun is as happy when he
smiles through the rain-clouds, as when he burns in the mid-height of
heaven, in the fierceness of his beauty; and I am happy whether I smile
or I weep.”--“Those whom you are about to see,” said the stranger,
offering her the telescope, “are as remote in their forms of worship as
smiles from tears; but they are not, like you, equally happy in both.”
Immalee applied her eye to the telescope, and exclaimed in rapture at
what she saw. “What do you see?” said the stranger. Immalee described
what she saw with many imperfect expressions, which, perhaps, may be
rendered more intelligible by the explanatory words of the stranger. “You see,” said he, “the coast of India, the shores of the world near
you.--There is the black pagoda of Juggernaut, that enormous building on
which your eye is first fixed. Beside it stands a Turkish mosque--you
may distinguish it by a figure like that of the half-moon. It is the
will of him who rules that world, that its inhabitants should worship
him by that sign(13). At a small distance you may see a low building
with a trident on its summit--that is the temple of Maha-deva, one of
the ancient goddesses of the country.”--“But the houses are nothing to
me,” said Immalee, “shew me the living things that go there. The houses
are not half so beautiful as the rocks on the shore, draperied all over
with sea-weeds and mosses, and shaded by the distant palm-tree and
cocoa.”--“But those buildings,” said the tempter, “are indicative of the
various modes of thinking of those who frequent them. If it is into
their thoughts you wish to look, you must see them expressed by their
actions.