And then as the youth grew to manhood, wrapt in these high and glorious communings with Nature and his God, the love which had hitherto filled his soul with an unuttered melody sprang like lightning to his lips, and he stood up before the world to tell what the spirit of God should whisper him of Christ and his love to the lost and guilty—of heaven and its inconceivable glories. But even into the holy religion which he preached he carried the ever-present spirit of Poetry, while he neglected not to expound in a simple manner the truths of the gospel, it was plain that he loved better to soar upward into the regions of the vast and terrible unknown where sits the Omnipotent clothed in his own infinity. He roamed the vast field opened by revelation, and culled the fairest flowers and the richest treasures that he might lay them with his heart’s devotion a willing offering upon the altar of the Almighty. Time went on, and a new class of emotions was awakened in his breast. The love which before was lavished on every thing beautiful in heaven or earth, was turned into a new channel, centered upon one object; and within his heart was a secret image that was worshiped as second to naught save his God. The moment that Emma came before him with her delicate and ethereal loveliness, the spirit within him whispered that that pale sweet face should be his destiny. He listened to her voice and the echo of its melody was thenceforth around him night and day, and the very circumstance, that in a more worldly mind would have quenched the first risings of affection by a sense of its utter hopelessness, only served to draw him more closely to her. In the brightness and in the gloom, in the sunshine and beneath the radiance of the pale-browed queen of night, since the gates of Eden closed on guilty man, there has walked an angel over the earth. Amid the green glades and flowery meads, beneath the mighty forest trees and over the barren wastes, over the tossing billows and within the crowded city, up the majestic rivers and in the wild solitudes whence ariseth the song of Nature untremulous and clear, has her footstep passed and the light of her starry eye been seen. In that “better land” she is the angel who waits without the gate of the celestial city and opens it to the holy and blessed ones who crowd thither. To them she seems bright and beautiful, and her voice hath an echo of the songs of heaven, but on earth she wears a more sombre garb, and her eye hath a shade of gloom far in its misty depths, and men call her the angel of Death. This angel had for months been walking with Emma, step for step, along the path of life, and sealing with her icy touch the springs of existence. Before George saw her, consumption had marked her for the tomb. He knew it by the strange brightness of her eyes and the hectic flush upon her cheek, and yet the young pastor loved her