and stablish himself in those courses he approves. The
unremitting retention of simple and high sentiments in obscure duties
is hardening the character to that temper which will work with honor,
if need be in the tumult, or on the scaffold. Whatever outrages have
happened to men may befall a man again; and very easily in a republic,
if there appear any signs of a decay of religion. Coarse slander, fire,
tar and feathers and the gibbet, the youth may freely bring home to his
mind and with what sweetness of temper he can, and inquire how fast
he can fix his sense of duty, braving such penalties, whenever it may
please the next newspaper and a sufficient number of his neighbors to
pronounce his opinions incendiary.

It may calm the apprehension of calamity in the most susceptible heart
to see how quick a bound Nature has set to the utmost infliction of
malice. We rapidly approach a brink over which no enemy can follow us:--

"Let them rave:
Thou art quiet in thy grave."

In the gloom of our ignorance of what shall be, in the hour when we are
deaf to the higher voices, who does not envy those who have seen safely
to an end their manful endeavor? Who that sees the meanness of our
politics but inly congratulates Washington that he is long already
wrapped in his shroud, and for ever safe; that he was laid sweet in
his grave, the hope of humanity not yet subjugated in him? Who does not
sometimes envy the good and brave who are no more to suffer from the
tumults of the natural world, and await with curious complacency the
speedy term of his own conversation with finite nature? And yet the love
that will be annihilated sooner than treacherous has already made death
impossible, and affirms itself no mortal but a native of the deeps of
absolute and inextinguishable being.

*****

THE OVER-SOUL.

"BUT souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity."
Henry More.

Space is ample, east and west,
But two cannot go abreast,
Cannot travel in it two:
Yonder masterful cuckoo
Crowds every egg out of the nest,
Quick or dead, except its own;
A spell is laid on sod and stone,
Night and Day 've been tampered with,
Every quality and pith