BEAUtY OF THfi iTlftSf. U8 



lulled to sleep by the sweet murmur of its own gentle billows. 

 Above us were the new heavens to which we have referred, and 

 in the resplendent light of its eternal stars, we seemed but an 

 atom of thought in the boundless and magnificent universe of 

 God. Nor could we banish the pleasant thought that there may 

 be a deep and broad basis of fact in the mystic dreams and 

 visions of the poets and prophets of the buried ages, whose men- 

 tal vision discovered not only in all the surrounding air, but also 

 in the profound depths of illimitable space, a vast universe of 

 spirits viewless as tlie wind and swift as the sun-beams. Amid 

 the chaotic desolation of the bleak summit of Mount Wasliing- 

 ton, with a piercing cold wind blowing at the rate of seventy 

 miles an hour, we instinctively look earth-ward for fairies and 

 fairy land, spirits and spirit land, but in the warm, clear, aro- 

 matic air of the summer isles, sporting in the moonlight and 

 starlight, or lurking in the soft shadows, it is easy for supersti- 

 tion and credulity to believe in the existence of invisible spirits 

 whose actual presence the quickened senses seem to actually per- 

 ceive and recognize. 



While gazing upward at the magnificent stellar display, the 

 crushing feeling of one's utter insignificance was somewhat re- 

 lieved by the comforting thought that the human soul was 

 created by the same divine power that filled the vast dome above 

 us with its brilliant display of revolving suns and systems of 

 worlds; that great and small are relative terms invented and used 

 only by mortals; and that an indestructable thread, real but in- 

 visible, connects and binds all to each other and to God. 



If this is so, we can give an affirmative answer to Wliittier's 

 momentous question — 



♦' Thi«i consoious life, is it the same 

 That thrilla the universal frame ?" 



