immensities."

Perhaps the force of these arguments may be better condensed and
expressed by help of an individual illustration. While the pen is
forming these words, the announcement of the death of Dr. Kane
saddens the world. Alas that the gallant heart no longer beats,
the story of whose noble generosity and indomitable prowess has
just thrilled the dull nations of men of meaner mould! Who even
though standing before a telescope under the full architecture of
the heavens can believe that that maiden soul of heroism and
devotion is now but an extinguished spark, that the love, honor,
intelligence, self sacrificing consecration which enswathed him as
with a saintly halo have all gone out? Turning from that pale
form, stretched on the couch of death in fatal Cuba, through the
receding gulfs of space where incomputable systems of worlds are
wheeling on their eternal courses, and then looking back again
from the noiseless glitter and awful bulk of the creation, do you
despair of the immortal consequence of the poor sufferer whose
fleshly moorings to existence are successively loosening at every
gasp? Ah, remember that Matter and the Soul are not alone! Far
above that clay bound, struggling soul, and far above those
measureless, firmamental masses, is God, the Maker of them both,
and the Lover of his child. Glancing in His omniscience down upon
that human death couch, around which affectionate prayers are
floating from every part of the earth, and from whose pallid
occupant confiding sighs are rising to His ear, He sees the
unutterable mysteries of yearning thought, emotion, and power,
which are the hidden being of man, and which so ally the filial
spirit to the parent Divinity. As beneath His gaze the faithful
soul of Elisha Kane slowly extricating itself from its overwrought
tabernacle, and also extricating itself from the holy network of
heart strings which sixty millions of men speaking one speech have
flung around him, if haply so they might retain him to earth to
take their love and waiting honors rises into the invisible,
seeking to return, bearing its virgin purity with it, to the bosom
of God, will He overlook it, or carelessly spurn it into night,
because the banks of stars are piled up so thick and high that
they absorb His regards? My soul, come not thou into the counsels
of them that think so! It should not be believed though astronomy
were a thousand times astronomy. But it shall rather be thought
that, e