on his condition--his brief date, his speedy doom--how inconsiderable his
existence appears! Or when he regards himself as not a compound of matter
merely, but as a living soul, how easy it seems, as his contemplation runs
out absorbed into the wondrous glory of the world, for all the vital
energy which is for a moment insulated in his frame, when his frame
dissolves, to pass into the general substance from which it came, the
thinking creature ending as it began! But a voice from heaven cries to him
and says, "Because he hath set his love upon me, therefore will I deliver
him. I will set him on high because he hath known my name; with long life
will I satisfy him and show him my salvation."

This love of God makes the society of all human affection. "God made the
country, and man made the town," is an oft quoted line; and not seldom it
is implied that the open or thinly-peopled landscape is somehow a better
and holier place for the soul than the thronged city. But let it not be
forgotten that man himself is God's work and His highest work on earth.
Would we sing our psalm now or hereafter with the sweetest relish, we must
go forth from any little circle we may have drawn around us, of private
ease and personal comfort, in friendly intercourse to hear the cry of the
unfortunate, the sighing of the prisoner, the sob of the mourner, the
groan of the sick, the appeal of the injured and oppressed. By our aid,
consolation and succor, we must gather their voices into the chorus,
before, with perfect satisfaction, we can mingle in it our own.

Upon a Sabbath day, I walked amid all those charms and fascinations, in
which nature can bind us as in a spell. I passed through green aisles of
woods, that were ever-shadowed and made fragrant with every various
vegetable growth of this temperate northern clime; while the morning beam
of the sun in heaven fell brightly aslant the leaves and branches; and the
birds, that my lonely step startled from their perch or nest, flew from
glen to glen, making with their song, save the murmur of the breeze in the
boughs, the only sound I could hear. At length, the high-arched avenues of
this immense forest-cathedral let me out upon the broad, open shore,
where I saw and heard wave after wave break on the rocks, with shifting
splendor and that mellow thundering music which so saddens while it
delights. Solitude, verily, was stretched out asleep in the sun upon the
length of sandy beach and beetling