nd me, yet impotent of evil!

Whether in calm or in storm--at dawn of day, with the rosy flush of the
rising sun blushing the horizon up to the zenith, or at night, with the
twinkling stars shining down into its sombre depths and the recurring
flashes of sheet lightning lighting up its immensity, which seems vaster
as the darkness grows--it is to me always attractive, ever lovable.

In its bright buoyancy it exhilarates me; in its calm, it causes me to
dream; and, in its wild moods, when heaven and sea appear to meet
together in wrestling embrace, I can--if joyous at the time--almost
shout aloud in ecstasy of admiring awe and kindred riot of mind; while,
should I feel sad during the carnival of the elements, I get reflective,
and--

"As I watch the ocean
In pitiless commotion,
Like the thoughts, now surging wildly through my storm-tost breast,
The snow-capt, heaving billows
Seem to me as lace-fring'd pillows
Of the deep Deep's bed of rest!"

Did you ever chance to read Chateaubriand's _Genie du Christianisme_?

It is a queer book for a Frenchman to have written, but abounding in
beautiful description and startling bits of observation. I remember,
one evening on the passage out, when it was very rough, having a
particular sentence of this work especially called to my mind. It was
that in which the author discourses on the Deity, and says,--

"I do not profess to be anything myself; I am only a solitary unit.
But I have often heard learned men disputing about a chief originator,
or prime cause, and I have never been able to comprehend their
arguments; for I have always noticed that it is at the sight of the
stupendous movements of nature that the idea of this unknown supreme
`origin' becomes manifested to the mind of man."

This sentence was the more impressed on my memory, from the fact, that,
on the very same evening, while reading the appointed portion of the
Psalms out of the little Prayer-book which Min had given me--a duty that
I had promised her to perform regularly every day--I came across a
verse, which, in different language, expressed almost the very same
thing. It was the one wherein David exclaims, "They that go down to the
sea in ships, and occupy their business in great waters, these men see
the works of the Lord, and His wonders in the deep!"

Our voyage was uneventful, beyond this one instance of rough weather--
when, throughout the night, as the steamer pitched and he