heard the Master speak,
And "waves," who by His voice transfixed were stayed,
And stars that lighted Christ's deep shade--
Your confirmation of our trust we seek.
Ye know how shadowy Death's dreary prison,
Because ye witnessed Christ our life, up risen.

THE WILLOWS, 1858.

THE NEW ENGLAND THANKSGIVING.

BY THE REV. HENRY W. BELLOWS, D.D.

When cellar and barn and storehouse were filled with food for the coming
winter, our pious New England forefathers used their first common leisure
to make public and joyful acknowledgment of their blessings to the God of
sunshine and of rain; to Him, who clothes the valleys with corn, and the
hills with flocks. Almost universally, they placed the meeting-houses,
where these thanks were rendered, on the hill-top commanding the widest
view of the fields from which their prosperity sprung, and nearest to the
sky, whence their blessings came. Their modest homes were sheltered from
the winds by the barns that held their wealth and overshadowed their low
dwellings. The earth was precious in their eyes, as the source of their
living. They could spare no fertile or sheltered spot, even for the
burial-ground, but economically laid it out in the sand, or on the bleak
hill-side; while they threw away no fencing on the house of God, but
jealously preserved that costly distinction for their arable lands and
orchards. They were farmers; and it was no unmeaning thing for them to
keep the harvest feast. They had prayed in drought, with all faith and
fervor, for the blessing of rain; in seed-time, for the favoring sunshine
and soft showers; and in harvest, that blight and frost might spare their
corn; and when in the late autumn, all their prayers had been heard, and
their hands and homes were crowned with plenty, their thanksgiving anthem
was an incense of the heart, and their honored pastors knew not how to
pour out a flood of gratitude too copious for the thankful people's
"Amen." A full hour's prayer wearied not their patient knees; and the
sermon, with its sixteenthly, finally, and to conclude (before the
_improvement_, itself a modern sermon in length), did not outmeasure the
people's honest sense of their grounds of thankfulness to God.

The landscape appropriate to thanksgiving is not furnished by brick walls
and stone pavements. It is a rural festival. The smoke from scattered
cottages should be slowly curling its way through frosty air. As we look
fo