omet
Arose, and it shall set;
While blazon'd, as on heaven's immortal noon,
The Cross leads generations on.

"Swift as the radiant shapes of sleep,
From one whose dreams are paradise,
Fly, when the fond wretch wakes to weep,
And day peers forth with her blank eyes:
So fleet, so faint, so fair,
The powers of earth and air
Fled from the folding star of Bethlehem.
Apollo, Pan, and Love,
And even Olympian Jove,
Grew weak, for killing Truth had glared on them.
Our hills, and seas, and streams,
Dispeopled of their dreams,
Their water turned to blood, their dew to tears,
Wailed for the golden years."

For my own part, I cannot read these lines without emotion--not so much
for their beauty as for the change in the writer's mind which they
suggest. The self-sacrifice which lies at the centre of Christianity
should have touched this man more deeply than almost any other. That it
was beginning to touch and mould him, I verily believe. He died and made
_that_ sign. Of what music did that storm in Spezia Bay rob the world!

"The Cross leads generations on." Believing as I do that my own personal
decease is not more certain than that our religion will subdue the world,
I own that it is with a somewhat saddened heart that I pass my thoughts
around the globe, and consider how distant is yet that triumph. There
are the realms on which the crescent beams, the monstrous many-headed
gods of India, the Chinaman's heathenism, the African's devil-rites.
These are, to a large extent, principalities and powers of darkness with
which our religion has never been brought into collision, save at trivial
and far separated points, and in these cases the attack has never been
made in strength. But what of our own Europe--the home of philosophy, of
poetry, and painting? Europe, which has produced Greece, and Rome, and
England's centuries of glory; which has been illumined by the fires of
martyrdom; which has heard a Luther preach; which has listened to Dante's
"mystic unfathomable song"; to which Milton has opened the door of
heaven--what of it? And what, too, of that younger America, starting in
its career with all our good things, and enfranchised of many of our
evils? Did not the December sun now shining look down on thousands
slaughtered at Fredericksburg, in a most mad, most incomprehensible
quarrel? And is not the public air which European nations breathe at
this moment, as it