will find it hard to be miserable in my company; I
drain you of ill-conditioned thoughts as I carry away the refuse of your
dwelling and its grounds."

But to him whom the ocean chills and crushes with its sullen
indifference, and the river disturbs with its never-pausing 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