spiration;
True; but is this conclusion fair to make--
That inspiration must be all mistake?
A pebble-stone is not a diamond: true;
But must a diamond be a pebble too?
To own a God who does not speak to men,
Is first to own, and then disown again;
Of all idolatry the total sum
Is having gods that are both deaf and dumb.

* * * * *

What is more tender than a mother's love
To the sweet infant fondling in her arms?
What arguments need her compassion move
To hear its cries, and help it in its harms?
Now, if the tenderest mother were possessed
Of all the love within her single breast
Of all the mothers since the world began,
'Tis nothing to the love of God to man.

* * * * *

Faith, Hope, and Love were questioned what they thought
Of future glory which Religion taught:
Now Faith believed it firmly to be true,
And Hope expected so to find it too:
Love answered, smiling with a conscious glow,
"Believe? Expect? I _know_ it to be so."

CHAPTER XX.

THE ROOTS OF THE HILLS.

In the poems of James Thomson, we find two hymns to the God of
Creation--one in blank verse, the other in stanzas. They are of the kind
which from him we should look for. The one in blank verse, which is as an
epilogue to his great poem, _The Seasons_, I prefer.

We owe much to Thomson. Born (in Scotland) in the year 1700, he is the
leading priest in a solemn procession to find God--not in the laws by
which he has ordered his creation, but in the beauty which is the outcome
of those laws. I do not say there is much of the relation of man to
nature in his writing; but thitherward it tends. He is true about the
outsides of God; and in Thomson we begin to feel that the revelation of
God as _meaning_ and therefore _being_ the loveliness of nature, is about
to be recognized. I do not say--to change my simile--that he is the first
visible root in our literature whence we can follow the outburst of the
flowers and foliage of our delight in nature: I could show a hundred
fibres leading from the depths of our old literature up to the great
root. Nor is it surprising that, with his age about him, he too should be
found tending to magnify, not God's Word, but his works, above all his
name: we have beauty for loveliness; beneficence for tenderness. I have
wondered whether one great part of Napoleon's mission was not to wake
people from th