Memory is like the painter or the sun-set—its images appear more real than the substantial things they picture, and glow the richer as the gloom of oblivion gathers around them. Turn your eyes eastward! Night sits upon the landscape. No ray of the past illuminates it. The very elevation on which you stand increases the darkness with its shadow, while it widens your distance from every object vaguely and fearfully looming through the evening mist. This is a vision of the _future_. That height of land which seems to reach the clouds, upon whose dusky flank the overawed imagination figures cave and precipice, torrent and cataract, is but a gentle slope, with just enough of rudeness to render still more beautiful by contrast, the village spire, the moss-roofed mill, the waving grain that crowns its very top. Such it is seen by day. Thus, when, in middle life, man peers into the future, what frightful shadows haunt him. Coming events magnified to giants by the obscurity around, stalk menacingly forward. Danger threatens him at every step, and there is naught beyond but that black back-ground—_Death_! The heavens shed no light upon the future. He is descending the hill of life, and their glories are fading behind him. He strives to borrow from the past a gleam to guide him onward, but in vain! Too often his own ambition has prompted him to choose the lofty path that now condemns him to redoubled darkness. Yet, although these spectres of the gloom are most frequently mere creatures of the brain, which day-light would dispel, they govern his career and cover him with dread. The _dream_ is _truth_ to him—and it is only _truth itself_ that he esteems a _dream_! Why can he not wait for sun-rise! Then should he see even the grave overhung with the verdure of spring, and death arrayed in all the glory of a morn of promise! There is reality in dreams!—Come, then, and let us dream together!—our visions may be dark sometimes, but we will not forget that the sun will rise on the morrow. ----- [2] When the celebrated Indian Chief, Tecumseh entered a Council Chamber of the whites, where the officers, already seated, thoughtlessly allowed him to remain standing, his countenance in gathering gloom, betrayed the consciousness of the slight, which _savage_ courtesy would not have suffered to occur. The look aroused attention, and a chair was handed him—but his proud lip curled. He threw himself upon the ground, exclaiming—“Tecumseh will repose on the bosom of his mother!” A SERMON BY A MARMOT—OR THE EXILE OF CONNECTICUT. “But come thy ways!—we’ll go along together; And ere we have thy youthful wages spent, We’ll light upon some settled, low content.” _As You Like It._