at of Scripture, are
exceedingly comprehensive and magnificent. Nature becomes to the poet's
eye "_a great sheet let down from God out of heaven_," and in which there
is no object "common or unclean." The purpose and the Being above cast
such a grandeur over the pettiest or barest objects, as did the fiery
pillar upon the sand, or the shrubs of the howling desert of its march.
Every thing becomes valuable when looked upon as a communication from God,
imperfect only from the nature of the material used. What otherwise might
have been concluded discords, now appear only stammerings or whisperings
in the Divine voice; thorns and thistles spring above the primeval curse,
the "meanest flower that blows" gives

"Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

The creation is neither unduly exalted nor contemptuously trampled
under-foot, but maintains its dignified position, as an embassador from
the Divine King. The glory of something far beyond association--that of a
divine and perpetual presence--is shed over the landscape, and its
golden-drops are spilled upon the stars. Objects the most diverse--the
cradle of the child, the wet hole of the centipede, the bed of the corpse,
and the lair of the earthquake, the nest of the lark, and the crag on
which sits, half asleep, the dark vulture, digesting blood--are all clothed
in a light the same in kind, though varying in degree--

"A light which never was on sea or shore."

In the poetry of the Hebrews, accordingly, the locusts are God's "great
army;"--the winds are his messengers, the thunder his voice, the lightning
a "fiery stream going before him," the moon his witness in the heavens,
the sun a strong man rejoicing to run his race--all creation is roused and
startled into life through him--its every beautiful, or dire, or strange
shape in the earth or the sky, is God's movable tent; the place where, for
a season, his honor, his beauty, his strength, and his justice dwell--the
tenant not degraded, and inconceivable dignity being added to the abode.

His mere "tent," however--for while the great and the infinite are thus
connected with the little and the finite, the subordination of the latter
to the former is always maintained. The most magnificent objects in nature
are but the mirrors to God's face--the scaffolding to his future purposes;
and, like mirrors, are to wax dim; and, like scaffolding, to be removed.
The great sheet is to be _received up_ again in