EMBLEMS OF ENCOURAGEMENT. 199 



Is such course ours ? or is it that gently winding path which 

 follows the curve of moral beauty ? Do we remember that 



"The road the human being travels, 

 That on which blessing comes and goes, doth follow 

 The river's course, the valley's playful windings, 

 Curves round the cornfields and the hill of vines, 

 Honouring the holy bounds of property ?"* 



If such our course, and every step be taken in confident but 

 humble reliance on Him who directs alike the movements of 

 myriads of insects and myriads of worlds, and guides (though 

 with no such absolute rule) the movements of mind, we may 

 stumble, but we shall not fall. 



Should it even appear that, sharing, in a moral sense, the 

 legendary doom of a certain family of. Tracies,f we have al- 

 ways to encounter the wind in our faces, He who has endowed 

 the frail wing of the butterfly with power to support her 

 against a current of air, and the slender limbs of the dimi- 

 nutive Velia with power to glide against a current of water, 

 will not afford less help to us in battling the adverse elements 

 of life. 



He who has given to the fly the admirable gift of walking 

 against gravity has provided us with fitting aids for the ascen- 

 sion of steeps and acclivities so slippery and perpendicular as 



* Coleridge. 



f Descendants of one of the knights who killed Thomas a Becket, upon whom, 

 for the ci-ime of their ancestor, this miraculous penance was said to have been im- 

 posed, whether going by land or water. FITLLEB. 



VOL. III. 13. 



