exalting of the heart, for the soothing it and
purifying it from its dross and dust. Sometimes gentle, sometimes
capricious, sometimes awful, never the same for two moments together;
almost human in its passions, almost spiritual in its tenderness, almost
divine in its infinity, its appeal to what is immortal in us, is as
distinct, as its ministry of chastisement or of blessing to what is
mortal is essential. And yet we never attend to it, we never make it a
subject of thought, but as it has to do with our animal sensations; we
look upon all by which it speaks to us more clearly than to brutes, upon
all which bears witness to the intention of the Supreme, that we are to
receive more from the covering vault than the light and the dew which we
share with the weed and the worm, only as a succession of meaningless
and monotonous accident, too common and too vain to be worthy of a
moment of watchfulness, or a glance of admiration. If in our moments of
utter idleness and insipidity, we turn to the sky as a last resource,
which of its phenomena do we speak of? One says it has been wet, and
another it has been windy, and another it has been warm. Who, among the
whole chattering crowd, can tell me of the forms and the precipices of
the chain of tall white mountains that girded the horizon at noon
yesterday? Who saw the narrow sunbeam that came out of the south, and
smote upon their summits until they melted and mouldered away in a dust
of blue rain? Who saw the dance of the dead clouds when the sunlight
left them last night, and the west wind blew them before it like
withered leaves? All has passed, unregretted as unseen; or if the apathy
be ever shaken off, even for an instant, it is only by what is gross, or
what is extraordinary; and yet it is not in the broad and fierce
manifestations of the elemental energies, not in the clash of the hail,
nor the drift of the whirlwind, that the highest characters of the
sublime are developed. God is not in the earthquake, nor in the fire,
but in the still small voice. They are but the blunt and the low
faculties of our nature, which can only be addressed through lampblack
and lightning. It is in quiet and subdued passages of unobtrusive
majesty, the deep, and the calm, and the perpetual,--that which must be
sought ere it is seen, and loved ere it is understood,--things which
the angels work out for us daily, and yet vary eternally, which are
never wanting, and never repeated, which are to