l veil, hides the face of Nature, and he only can
venture to lift it who has won the privilege by long and faithful
devotion.

If the night be starlit the shadows are denser, the outlook narrower,
the mystery deeper; but what a vision overhangs the world and makes the
night sublime with the poetry of God's thought visible to all eyes!
Who does not feel the passage of divine dreams over his troubled life
when the infinite meadows of heaven are suddenly abloom with light? On
such a night immortality is written on earth and sky; in the silence
and darkness there is no hint of death; a sweet and fragrant life seems
to breathe its subtle, inaudible music through all things. In the
depths of the woods one feels no loneliness; no liquid note of hermit
thrush is needed to make that silence music. The harmony of universal
movement, rounded by one thought, carried forward by one power, guided
to one end, is there for those who will listen; the mighty activities
which feed the century-girded oak from the invisible chambers of air
and the secret places of the earth are so divinely adjusted to their
work that one shall never detect their toil by any sound of struggle or
by any sight of effort. Noiselessly, invisibly, the great world
breathes new life into every part of its being, while the darkness
curtains it from the fierce ardour of the day.

In the night the fountains are open and flowing; a marvellous freshness
touches leaf and flower and grass, and rebuilds their shattered
loveliness. The stars look down from their inaccessible heights on a
new creation, and as the procession of the hours passes noiselessly on,
it leaves behind a dewy fragrance which shall exhale before the rising
sun, like a universal incense, making the portals of the morning sweet
with prophecies of the flowers which are yet to bloom, and the birds
whose song still sleeps with the hours it shall set to music. The
unbroken repose of Nature, born not of idleness but of the perfect
adjustment of immeasurable forces to their task, becomes more real and
comprehensible when the darkness hides the infinitude of details, and
leaves only the great massive effects for the eye to rest upon. While
men sleep, the world sweeps silently onward under the watchful stars,
in a flight which makes no sound and leaves no trace. Through the deep
shadows the mountains loom in solitary and awful grandeur; the wide
seas send forth and recall their mighty tides; the contine