where imagination, the
painter, sits, with his pencil dipt in hues lovelier than those of sunset,
adorning familiar life with glowing tints. What a noble boon, worthy the
giver, is the imagination! it takes from reality its leaden hue: it
envelopes all thought and sensation in a radiant veil, and with an hand of
beauty beckons us from the sterile seas of life, to her gardens, and
bowers, and glades of bliss. And is not love a gift of the divinity? Love,
and her child, Hope, which can bestow wealth on poverty, strength on the
weak, and happiness on the sorrowing.

"My lot has not been fortunate. I have consorted long with grief, entered
the gloomy labyrinth of madness, and emerged, but half alive. Yet I thank
God that I have lived! I thank God, that I have beheld his throne, the
heavens, and earth, his footstool. I am glad that I have seen the changes
of his day; to behold the sun, fountain of light, and the gentle pilgrim
moon; to have seen the fire bearing flowers of the sky, and the flowery
stars of earth; to have witnessed the sowing and the harvest. I am glad
that I have loved, and have experienced sympathetic joy and sorrow with my
fellow-creatures. I am glad now to feel the current of thought flow through
my mind, as the blood through the articulations of my frame; mere existence
is pleasure; and I thank God that I live!

"And all ye happy nurslings of mother-earth, do ye not echo my words? Ye
who are linked by the affectionate ties of nature, companions, friends,
lovers! fathers, who toil with joy for their offspring; women, who while
gazing on the living forms of their children, forget the pains of
maternity; children, who neither toil nor spin, but love and are loved!

"Oh, that death and sickness were banished from our earthly home! that
hatred, tyranny, and fear could no longer make their lair in the human
heart! that each man might find a brother in his fellow, and a nest of
repose amid the wide plains of his inheritance! that the source of tears
were dry, and that lips might no longer form expressions of sorrow.
Sleeping thus under the beneficent eye of heaven, can evil visit thee, O
Earth, or grief cradle to their graves thy luckless children? Whisper it
not, let the demons hear and rejoice! The choice is with us; let us will
it, and our habitation becomes a paradise. For the will of man is
omnipotent, blunting the arrows of death, soothing the bed of disease, and
wiping away the tears of agony. And what