promontory; and I sat and gazed now
over the boundless waters, now into the devouring abysses opened by the
bending crests of the billows, and anon into the gloomy depths of the
forest or the serene and measureless openings of the sky. What grandeur in
every line transcendent! Yet what impenetrable mystery too, what menacing
ruin to the small remnant of human life still spared from the generations
in ages past, already swallowed up! Peering around in this pensive mood,
in which the joy of being mixed with the uneasy doubt of its tenure, my
eye fell at last on the spire of a little church, rising like a pencil of
light to heaven, out of the fathomless waste. And there my soul alighted
and found rest. Like some sea mark to the voyager, that slender shaft,
reared by the social religion of the world, stood to tell me where in the
universe I was; the common Christian consciousness reinforced my own, and
dark queries and agitating uncertainties subsided from my spirit, as the
deluge from the dove that Noah sent out to pluck the green branch of
promise. From the illimitable reaches of the huge, but dimly responding
creation around, the slight, frail temple for God's praise drew me to its
welcome and peaceful embrace. As I approached it, the tolling of the bell
struck on my ear in a touch of gladder tidings than I had received from
all the melody of the great wind-harp of the trees, with all the soft
accord of the tossing billows. Stroke after stroke, distinctly falling,
seemed to bring to me the echoes of a million holy telegraphic towers all
over the surface of the globe; and when I came to stand under the eaves of
the small sanctuary, the measured turning, in the belfry, of the wheel, by
revolutions such as I had seen long years ago in my childhood, filled my
eyes with gracious tokens, that were not drawn from me by the sublime
circling of the sun and moon, then moving east and west in their spheres.
The final tone of praise in the great ascription to God is, in its
fullness, supplied by a revelation greater than blessed the times of
David. A new and sweeter string is strung upon the lyre his royal fingers
so nobly swept, and the voice of thanksgiving is more highly raised for an
"unspeakable gift." The kingdoms of nature are the chords on the harp we
may sound to the Creator of all. There has been of late much discussion as
to the place nature should hold among religious influences and appeals,
some super-eminently exalting he