d or the returning to
the old homestead, stirs old memories and kindles new thoughts.

Slowly the heart passes out of the penumbra. The mind, too long
obscured like a sun eclipsed by clouds, searches out some rift.
Suddenly reason comes into the clear. God rises like an untroubled sun
upon the soul's horizon. How crystalline life looks! The mind
literally exhales fancies and pictures, and each stick and stone is as
full of suggestions and ideas as the forest is full of birds. Old
problems become clear as noonday. Difficult questions lie clearly
revealed before the mind like landscapes from which the fogs are
lifted. Once the mind crawled tortoise-like through its work. Now it
soars like an eagle. The soul seems a sweet-spiced shrub, and every
leaf is perfumed. If in dull, obscure hours the soul was like a wooden
beehive drifted o'er with snow, in its vision-hours the soul is like a
glass hive out of which the bees go singing into sweet clover-fields.
In these hours how unworthy the material life! How insubstantial the
things of iron, wood and stone! Bodily things seem evanescent, as
frost pictures on the window on a winter's morn. Then honor,
integrity, kindness, generosity alone seem permanent and worth one's
while. How easy then to do right. All habits that fettered the
faculties like iron cuffs are now felt to be but ice fetters, quickly
melting. Then the nobler self, using no whip of cords, looks upon
meanness and selfishness, and by a look drives them from the heart and
life.

Then years are fulfilled in a single hour. Then from its judgment-seat
the soul reviews its past career, searches out secret sins and scorns
them. How unworthy are vanity and pride and selfishness. In what
garments of beauty and attraction are truth and purity clothed. The
soul looks longingly unto the heavenly heights, as desert pilgrims long
for oases and springs of water. Unspeakably precious are these
strategic hours of opportunity. God sends them; divineness is in them;
they cleanse and fertilize the soul; they are like the overflowing
Nile. Men should watch for them and lay out the life-course by them,
as captains ignore the clouds and headlands and steer by the stars for
a long voyage and a distant harbor.

INFLUENCE, AND THE PRINCIPLE OF REACTION IN LIFE AND CHARACTER.

"So each man gets out of the world of men the rebound, the increase and
development of what he brings there. Three men stand in