Upon a Sabbath day, I walked amid all those charms and fascinations, in which nature can bind us as in a spell. I passed through green aisles of woods, that were ever-shadowed and made fragrant with every various vegetable growth of this temperate northern clime; while the morning beam of the sun in heaven fell brightly aslant the leaves and branches; and the birds, that my lonely step startled from their perch or nest, flew from glen to glen, making with their song, save the murmur of the breeze in the boughs, the only sound I could hear. At length, the high-arched avenues of this immense forest-cathedral let me out upon the broad, open shore, where I saw and heard wave after wave break on the rocks, with shifting splendor and that mellow thundering music which so saddens while it delights. Solitude, verily, was stretched out asleep in the sun upon the length of sandy beach and beetling promontory; and I sat and gazed now over the boundless waters, now into the devouring abysses opened by the bending crests of the billows, and anon into the gloomy depths of the forest or the serene and measureless openings of the sky. What grandeur in every line transcendent! Yet what impenetrable mystery too, what menacing ruin to the small remnant of human life still spared from the generations in ages past, already swallowed up! Peering around in this pensive mood, in which the joy of being mixed with the uneasy doubt of its tenure, my eye fell at last on the spire of a little church, rising like a pencil of light to heaven, out of the fathomless waste. And there my soul alighted and found rest. Like some sea mark to the voyager, that slender shaft, reared by the social religion of the world, stood to tell me where in the universe I was; the common Christian consciousness reinforced my own, and dark queries and agitating uncertainties subsided from my spirit, as the deluge from the dove that Noah sent out to pluck the green branch of promise. From the illimitable reaches of the huge, but dimly responding creation around, the slight, frail temple for God's praise drew me to its welcome and peaceful embrace. As I approached it, the tolling of the bell struck on my ear in a touch of gladder tidings than I had received from all the melody of the great wind-harp of the trees, with all the soft accord of the tossing billows. Stroke after stroke, distinctly falling, seemed to bring to me the echoes of a million holy telegraphic towers all over the surface of the globe; and when I came to stand under the eaves of the small sanctuary, the measured turning, in the belfry, of the wheel, by revolutions such as I had seen long years ago in my childhood, filled my eyes with gracious tokens, that were not drawn from me by the sublime circling of the sun and moon, then moving east and west in their spheres. The final tone of praise in the great ascription to God is, in its fullness, supplied by a revelation greater than blessed the times of David.