terly to consume my unworth, and leave me shining bright, as if it
were impossible for Christ to love a heart without making it pure and
beautiful by the resting on it of that illuming affection, just as the
sun bathes into beauty the homeliest object when he looks full upon it.

* * * * *

=_48._= FROST ON THE WINDOW.

But the indefatigable night repairs the desolation. New pictures supply
the waste ones. New cathedrals there are, new forests, fringed and
blossoming, new sceneries, and new races of extinct animals. We are rich
every morning, and poor every noon. One day with us measures the space
of two hundred years in kingdoms--a hundred years to build up, and a
hundred years to decay and destroy; twelve hours to overspread the
evanescent pane with glorious beauty, and twelve to extract and
dissipate the pictures.... Shall we not reverently and rejoicingly
behold in these morning pictures, wrought without color, and kissed upon
the window by the cold lips of Winter, another instance of that Divine
Beneficence of beauty which suffuses the heavens?

* * * * *

From "Lectures to Young Men."

=_49._= NATURE, DESIGNED FOR OUR ENJOYMENT.

The _necessity_ of amusement is admitted on all hands. There is an
appetite of the eye, of the ear, and of every sense, for which God has
provided the material. Gaiety of every degree, this side of puerile
levity, is wholesome to the body, to the mind, and to the morals. Nature
is a vast repository of manly enjoyments. The magnitude of God's works
is not less admirable than its exhilarating beauty. The rudest forms
have something of beauty; the ruggedest strength is graced with some
charm; the very pins, and rivets, and clasps of nature, are attractive
by qualities of beauty, more than is necessary for mere utility. The sun
could go down without gorgeous clouds; evening could advance without its
evanescent brilliance; trees might have flourished without symmetry;
flowers have existed without odor, and fruit without flavor. When I have
journeyed through forests, where ten thousand shrubs and vines exist
without apparent use; through prairies, whose undulations exhibit sheets
of flowers innumerable, and absolutely dazzling the eye with their
prodigality of beauty--beauty, not a tithe of which is ever seen by
man--I have said, it is plain that God is himself passionately fond of
beauty, and the _earth_ is his garden, as an