and
never-ending story, the silent LAKE shall be a refuge and a place of rest
for his soul.

"'Vex not yourself with thoughts too vast for your limited faculties,' it
says; 'yield not yourself to the babble of the running stream. Leave the
ocean, which cares nothing for you or any living thing that walks the
solid earth; leave the river, too busy with its own errand, too talkative
about its own affairs, and find peace with me, whose smile will cheer
you, whose whisper will soothe you. Come to me when the morning sun
blazes across my bosom like a golden baldric; come to me in the still
midnight, when I hold the inverted firmament like a cup brimming with
jewels, nor spill one star of all the constellations that float in my
ebon goblet. Do you know the charm of melancholy? Where will you find a
sympathy like mine in your hours of sadness? Does the ocean share your
grief? Does the river listen to your sighs? The salt wave, that called
to you from under last month's full moon, to-day is dashing on the rocks
of Labrador; the stream, that ran by you pure and sparkling, has
swallowed the poisonous refuse of a great city, and is creeping to its
grave in the wide cemetery that buries all things in its tomb of liquid
crystal. It is true that my waters exhale and are renewed from one
season to another; but are your features the same, absolutely the same,
from year to year? We both change, but we know each other through all
changes. Am I not mirrored in those eyes of yours? And does not Nature
plant me as an eye to behold her beauties while she is dressed in the
glories of leaf and flower, and draw the icy lid over my shining surface
when she stands naked and ashamed in the poverty of winter?'

"I have had strange experiences and sad thoughts in the course of a life
not very long, but with a record which much longer lives could not match
in incident. Oftentimes the temptation has come over me with dangerous
urgency to try a change of existence, if such change is a part of human
destiny,--to seek rest, if that is what we gain by laying down the burden
of life. I have asked who would be the friend to whom I should appeal
for the last service I should have need of. Ocean was there, all ready,
asking no questions, answering none. What strange voyages, downward
through its glaucous depths, upwards to its boiling and frothing surface,
wafted by tides, driven by tempests, disparted by rude agencies; one
remnant whitening on the sands of