wful, never the
same for two moments together; almost human in its passions, almost
spiritual in its tenderness, almost divine in its infinity, its appeal
to what is immortal in us, is as distinct, as its ministry of
chastisement or of blessing to what is mortal, is essential.

5. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a subject of
thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we look upon
all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon all
which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to
receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which
we share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of
meaningless and monotonous accidents too common and too vain to be
worthy of a moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in
our moments of utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a
last resource, which of its phenomena do we speak of?

6. One says it has been wet, and another it has been windy, and
another it has been warm. Who, among the whole chattering crowd, can
tell me of the forms and the precipices of the chain of tall white
mountains that girded the horizon at noon yesterday? Who saw the
narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and smote upon their
summits until they melted and mouldered away in a dust of blue rain?
Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight left them last
night, and the west wind blew them before it like withered leaves?

7. All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy be ever
shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or what
is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce
manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the
hail, nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of
the sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the
fire, but in the still, small voice.

8. They are but the blunt and the low faculties of our nature, which
can only be addressed through lamp-black and lightning. It is in
quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive majesty, the deep, and the
calm, and the perpetual,--that which must be sought ere it is seen,
and loved ere it is understood,--things which the angels work out for
us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are never wanting, and never
repeated, which are to be found always yet each found but once; it is
through these that the lesson of devotion is chiefly taught, and