the many-coloured signals were continually flying and shifting.
They were the hawks among the covey of the larger white-plumed birds.

At this moment our gallant frigate, like a youthful and a regal giant,
more majestic from the lightness of her dress, walked in conscious
superiority in the midst of all. She had, as I before mentioned, just
set her top-gallant sails, in order to take her proud station in the
van. We now passed vessel after vessel, each with a different quantity
of canvas set, according to her powers of sailing. It was altogether a
glorious sight, and to my feelings, excelled in quiet and cheerful
sublimity any review, however splendid might be the troops, or imposing
their numbers. Then the breeze came so freshly and kissingly on my
cheek, whispering such pleasant things to my excited fancy, and
invigorating so joyously the fibres of my heart--I looked around me, and
was glad.

When the soul is big with all good and pure feelings, gratitude will be
there; and, at her smiling invitation, piety will come cheerfully and
clasp her hand. Surely not that sectarian piety, which metes out wrath
instead of mercy to an erring world; not that piety, dealing "damnation
round the land," daily making the pale, within which the only few to be
saved are folded, more and more circumscribed; nor even that bigotted,
sensuous piety, which floats on the frankincense that eddies round the
marble altar, and which, if unassisted by the vista of the dark aisle,
the dimly-seen procession, the choral hymn, the banner, and the relic,
faints, and sees no God: no, none of these will be the piety of a heart
exulting in the beneficence of the All-Good. Then and there, why should
I have wished to have crept and grovelled under piled and sordid stone?
Since first the aspiring architect spanned the arch at Thebes, which is
_not_ everlasting, and lifted the column at Rome, which is _not_
immortal, was there ever dome like that which glowed over my head
imagined by the brain of man? "Fretted with golden fires," and studded
with such glorious clouds, that it were almost sinful not to believe
that each veiled an angel; the vast concave, based all around upon the
sapphire horizon, sprang upwards, terminating above me in that deep,
deep, immeasurable blue, the best type of eternity;--was not this a
fitting temple for worship? What frankincense was ever equal to that
which nature then spread over the wave and through the air? All this