no 



giarice. It is the faithful witness of the divine power -which gave 

 it birth, the unerring chronicle of His power and majesty. Its 

 religion has never changed and can never vanish, but year 

 after year it bears aloft the consecrated symbols of flower and 

 seed — the flower that withers and fades, as life must fade, the 

 seed that is the fruit of departing life, the pledge and promise of 

 a resurrection. It has its own hieroglyphics too, inscribed upon 

 it, not the records of bearded kings, but the secrets of life, the 

 secrets of creation — mystic signs and symbols, the keys of which 

 are lost to earth, and are read only in heaven. Ages upon ages 

 ago it received the command to bring forth seed after its kind, 

 and it has never forgotten its trust. Buried, like Egypt's wheat, 

 with its mummy reaper for three thousand years, it never forgets 

 its duty. No human power can make it produce aught from its 

 tiny seed, excepting " after its kind ;" and to-day it rears its 

 beautiful shaft crowned with waving, graceful flowers and tasselled 

 seed vessels, as of old. Do we know any thing, after all, of this 

 slighted, unnoticed grass ? Have you really read one of its mys- 

 teries ? It grows from the seed, you say — but how, and why ? 

 What is hidden in that small shell, which brings forth this strange 

 organization ? Explain if you can, one mystery of its existence, 

 one secret of its growth and change, one of the hidden sources of 

 its beauty, its strength, and its usefulness to man, and then go to 

 Italy if you will, to wonder at the obelisk which the sorrowful Nile 

 sent to imperial Rome, and study its mysterious secrets. 



This is but one example which I have selected, on account of 

 its humility ; but the world is overflowing with this wonder and 

 mystery, which for want of another name we call beauty, and the 

 beautiful. We see it in the fading sunset, the vanishing clouds, 

 in the haunted shadows of the forest, in the dehcate wild flowers, 

 more beautiful and more rare, if we would but examine them, than 

 our coarser garden flowers. It is heard in the sounds of the 

 lonely wind, mourning among the pine boughs, in the music of the 

 wandering brooks, in that morning concert of the birds, when in 

 full orchestra, they welcome in the dawn, in the voice of the 

 solitary thrush, singing alone amid the woods, in the deep quiet of 

 noontide. The ancients in their beautiful fables symbolized this 

 beauty, and told of nymphs who dwelt in the shadows, and who 

 haunted the trees, the mountains, and the waters. That beauti- 



