572 THE MOUNTAIN. 



human form is the divinity either of Nemesis, or of God." 

 Can this be him of whom the mystical winds of the ages 

 whisper so grandly ? History mutters his story with a genu- 

 flection, and points with awe-struck hand to the heights of 

 Sinai, where he met the supernals in manly communion, and 

 his days were not like the "flower and the grass, which 

 springeth up in the morning and are cut down in the evening 

 time." Once he "strode the earth like a Colossus." Yene- 

 rable legends come down to us from primeval worlds, that he 

 erst communed with the Infinite, and, in the divine circle of 

 charms of his beautiful mother, Nature, was held entranced 

 for a thousand years ; that he carried the fires of life in that 

 charmed alembic of a body of his for ages, the angel of death 

 having almost forgotten that his title to its possession in per- 

 petuity was not valid. " For all the days of Methuselah were 

 nine hundred and sixty and nine years, and he died." Why 

 should the welling-up of those deep founts of physical im- 

 mortality ever have ceased, and man become the mushroom 

 of an hour ? With an absolute balance of forces, mechani- 

 cal and chemical, ponderable and imponderable, why should 

 not his body be as the Sequoia-tree of three thousand years 

 existence, which is a mere bottling of earth and gas ? With 

 a perfect organization, "with head and foot in private amity, 

 and both with moons and tides," why should not life be 

 longer, and man wander the earth a glorified and immortal 

 being, and not be forced to pass into the eternal state by an 

 agonized awakening as from a troubled dream ? 



"Nothing that is good can die; 

 Souls, that of His good life partake, 

 He loves as his own self; dear as his eye 

 They are to him ; he'll never them forsake. 

 When they shall die, then God himself shall die : 

 They live, they live in blest eternity." 



Why death should ever have arrived in those happy patri- 

 archal days is a subject of continued surprise to the philo- 

 sophic mind. But they say, also, that if it had not been for 



