‘The sensations which affect the corporeal faculties, as one views these stupendous creations of Omnipotence, are absolutely afflicting and painful. If you look at the summits of the mountains, when a cloud passes towards them, it is impossible for the eye to distinguish, at such a height, which is in motion, the mountain, or the cloud; and this deception of vision produces a dizziness, which few spectators have nerve enough to endure for many minutes. If the eye be fixed on the crags and masses of rock, that project from the sides of the mountains, the flesh involuntarily quivers, and the limbs seem to be impelled to retreat from a scene that threatens impendent destruction. If the thoughts which crowd upon the intellectual faculties are less painful than these sensations of flesh and blood, they are too sublime and overwhelming to be described. The frequent alterations and great changes, that have manifestly taken place in these majestic masses, since they were first piled together by the hand of the Creator, are calculated to awaken “thoughts beyond the reaches of the soul.” If the “everlasting hills” thus break in pieces, and shake the shaggy covering from their sides, who will deny that “This earthly globe, the creature of a day, Though built by God’s right hand, shall pass away?―― The sun himself, by gathering clouds oppressed, Shall, in his silent, dark pavilion rest; His golden urn shall break, and, useless, lie Among the common ruins of the sky; The stars rush headlong, in the wild commotion, And bathe their glittering foreheads in the ocean?” ‘Reflection needs not the authority of inspiration to warrant a belief, that this anticipation is something more than poetical. History and philosophy teach its truth, or, at least, its probability. The melancholy imaginings which it excites are relieved by the conviction that the whole of God’s creation is nothing less “Than a capacious reservoir of means, Formed for his use, and ready at his will;” and that, if this globe should be resolved into chaos, it will undergo a new organization, and be re-moulded into scenes of beauty, and abodes of happiness. Such may be the order of nature, to be unfolded in a perpetual series of material production and decay――of creation and dissolution――a magnificent procession of worlds and systems, in the march of eternity.’[1] A few weeks after the slide mentioned in the above description, a disaster occurred which occasioned the destruction of the interesting family to which allusion is there made.