BEAUTY OF THE Nien $45 
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 the wind and swift as the sun-beams. Amid 
the chaotic desolation of the bleak summit of Mount Washing- 
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 revulving 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 Whittier’s 
momentous question— 
“This conscious life, is it the same 
That thrills the universal frame?” 
