ds; or listen to the dancing rain,
calling up beauty where it fell; or mark at night, through his high
and narrow casement, the stars aloof, and the sweet moon pouring in
her light, like God's pardon, even through the dungeon-gloom and the
desolate scenes where Mortality struggles with Despair; he could not
catch, obstructed as they were, these, the benigner influences of
earth, and not sicken and pant for his old and full communion with their
ministry and presence. Sometimes all around him was forgotten, the harsh
cell, the cheerless solitude, the approaching trial, the boding
fear, the darkened hope, even the spectre of a troubled and fierce
remembrance,--all was forgotten, and his spirit was abroad, and his step
upon the mountain-top once more.

In our estimate of the ills of life, we never sufficiently take into our
consideration the wonderful elasticity of our moral frame, the unlooked
for, the startling facility with which the human mind accommodates
itself to all change of circumstance, making an object and even a joy
from the hardest and seemingly the least redeemed conditions of fate.
The man who watched the spider in his cell, may have taken, at least,
as much interest in the watch, as when engaged in the most ardent and
ambitious objects of his former life; and he was but a type of his
brethren; all in similar circumstances would have found some similar
occupation. Let any man look over his past life, let him recall not
moments, not hours of agony, for to them Custom lends not her blessed
magic; but let him single out some lengthened period of physical or
moral endurance; in hastily reverting to it, it may seem at first,
I grant, altogether wretched; a series of days marked with the black
stone,--the clouds without a star;--but let him look more closely, it
was not so during the time of suffering; a thousand little things, in
the bustle of life dormant and unheeded, then started froth into notice,
and became to him objects of interest or diversion; the dreary present,
once made familiar, glided away from him, not less than if it had
been all happiness; his mind dwelt not on the dull intervals, but the
stepping-stone it had created and placed at each; and, by that moral
dreaming which for ever goes on within man's secret heart, he lived as
little in the immediate world before him, as in the most sanguine period
of his youth, or the most scheming of his maturity.

So wonderful in equalizing all states and all