Let me call to my aid, then, some thoughtful spirit in my audience: not a poet, of necessity, or a man of genius, but a man of large meditation, one who is accustomed to observe, and, by virtue of the warm affinities of a living heart, to draw out the meanings that are hid so often in the humblest things. Returning into the bosom of his family in some interval of care and labor, he shall come upon the very unclassic and certainly unimposing scene,--his children and a kitten playing on the floor together; and just there, possibly, shall meet him suggestions more fresh and thoughts of higher reach concerning himself and his race, than the announcement of a new-discovered planet or the revolution of an empire would incite. He surveys with a meditative feeling this beautiful scene of muscular play,--the unconscious activity, the exuberant life, the spirit of glee,--and there rises in his heart the conception that possibly he is here to see the prophecy or symbol of another and higher kind of play, which is the noblest exercise and last end of man himself. Worn by the toils of years, perceiving with a sigh that the unconscious joy of motion here displayed is spent in himself, and that now he is effectually tamed to the doom of a working creature, he may yet discover, in the lively sympathy with play that bathes his inward feeling, that his soul is playing now,--enjoying, without the motions, all it could do in them; manifold more than it could if he were down upon the floor himself, in the unconscious activity and lively frolic of childhood. Saddened he may be to note how time and work have changed his spirit and dried away the playful springs of animal life in his being; yet he will find, or ought, a joy playing internally over the face of his working nature, which is fuller and richer as it is more tranquil; which is to the other as fulfillment to prophecy, and is in fact the prophecy of a better and far more glorious fulfillment still.