The dreamer awoke, and peered through the smoke At the anvil that slept by his side; And then in a wreath of flower-bound sheath, The triple-linked chain he espied. Odd Fellowship's gem is that bright diadem, Our emblem in age and in youth; For our hearts we must prove in the fire of LOVE, And mould with the hammer of TRUTH. [Decoration] XV. _WHITHERWARD._ By pursuing the analogies of nature, the human mind reduces to order the vagaries of the imagination, and bodies them forth in forms of loveliness and in similitudes of heaven. By an irrevocable decree of Nature's God, all his works are progressive in the direction of himself. This law is traceable from the molehill up to the mountain, from the mite up to the man. Geology, speaking to us from the depths of a past eternity, from annals inscribed upon the imperishable rock, utters not one syllable to contradict this tremendous truth. Millions of ages ago, she commenced her impartial record, and as we unroll it to-day, from the coal-bed and the marble quarry, we read in creation's dawn as plainly as we behold in operation around us, the mighty decree--ONWARD AND UPWARD, FOREVER! In the shadowy past this majestic globe floated through the blue ether, a boiling flood of lava. The elements were then unborn. Time was not; for as yet the golden laws of Kepler had not emerged from chaos. The sun had not hemmed his bright-eyed daughters in, nor marked out on the azure concave the paths they were to tread. The planets were not worlds, but shot around the lurid center liquid masses of flame and desolation. Comets sported at random through the sky, and trailed after them their horrid skirts of fire. The Spirit of God had not "moved upon the face of the waters," and rosy Chaos still held the scepter in his hand. But changes were at work. As the coral worm toils on in the unfathomable depths of ocean, laying in secret the foundations of mighty continents, destined as the ages roll by to emerge into light and grandeur, so the laws of the universe carried on their everlasting work. An eternity elapsed, and the age of fire passed away. A new era dawned upon the earth. The gases were generated, and the elements of air and water overspread the globe. Islands began to appear, at first presenting pinnacles of bare and blasted granite; but gradually, by decay and decomposition, changing into dank marshes and fertile plains. One after another the sensational universe now springs into being. This but prepared the way for the animated, and that in turn formed the groundwork and basis for the human. Man then came forth, the result of all her previous efforts--nature's pet, her paragon and her pride.