And when the summer’s glorious show is past, Its miracles no longer charm thy sight, The treasured riches of those thoughtful hours Shall make thy wintry musings warm and bright. CHAPTER VII. LITERATURE AND ART. THE MINISTER’S WOOING. [Sidenote: Romance.] All prosaic and all bitter, disenchanted people talk as if poets and novelists _made_ romances. They do, just as much as craters make volcanoes, no more. What is romance? Whence comes it? Plato spoke to the subject wisely, in his quaint way, some two thousand years ago, when he said, “Man’s soul, in a former state, was winged and soared among the gods: and so it comes to pass that, in this life, when the soul, by the power of music or poetry, or the sight of beauty, hath her remembrance quickened, forthwith there is a struggling and a pricking pain, as of wings trying to come forth, even as children in teething.” And if an old heathen, two thousand years ago, discoursed thus gravely of the romantic part of our nature, whence comes it that in Christian lands we think in so pagan a way of it, and turn the whole care of it to ballad-makers, romancers, and opera-singers? Let us look up in fear and reverence, and say, “God is the great maker of romance; He, from whose hand came man and woman,—He, who strung the great harp of existence,—He is the great poet of life.” Every impulse of beauty, of heroism, and every craving for purer love, fairer perfection, nobler type and style of being, than that which closes like a prison-house around us, in the dim, daily walk of life, is God’s breath, God’s impulse, God’s reminder to the soul that there is something higher, sweeter, purer, yet to be attained.... The dullest street of the most prosaic town has matter in it for more smiles, more tears, more intense excitement, than ever were written in story or sung in poem; the reality is there, of which the romance is the second-hand recorder. OLDTOWN FOLKS. [Sidenote: Hebrew literature.] But it is a most remarkable property of this old Hebrew literature that it seems to be enchanted with a divine and living power, which strikes the nerve of individual consciousness in every desolate and suffering soul. It may have been Judah or Jerusalem ages ago to whom these words first came, but as they have traveled on for thousands of years, they have seemed to tens of thousands of sinking and desolate souls the voice of God to them individually. They have raised the burden from thousands of crushed spirits; they have been as the day-spring to thousands of perplexed wanderers. Oh! let us treasure these old words, for as of old Jehovah chose to dwell in a tabernacle in the wilderness, and between the cherubim in the temple, so now He dwells in them; and to the simple soul that seeks for Him here, He will look forth as of old from the pillar of cloud and fire. * * * * *