I must confess this fills one with an immense reverence, a feeling of inexpressible awe. Yet, there is no fear associated with the emotion, but only a sense of unearthly peace which almost asks that the silence may be prolonged so that thought may have further scope. "Raise thou the stone . . . cleave thou the wood," and we are in the presence of the Everlasting; soul is face to face with the Soul of the world. Yea, in my flesh his spirit doth flow, Too near, too far for me to know. Is this mysticism? I know not by what name to call it, except that to me it is a reality transcending any merely sensible experience one ever enjoys upon this earth. It is the kingdom of the Unseen; but only the unseen things are real and eternal, for they are the hidden springs of existence and life. Can one resist the melancholy, the sense of tears in things when we reflect that, like our own bodily frame, the whole visible world is hastening to dissolution? From the infinitesimal insect whose earthly career is rounded off in a few moments, hardly come before gone, to the longest-lived of living beings, to the oaks that stand beyond a thousand years, to the hills that seemed so enduring that the Hebrew poet called them "everlasting," to this earth, to planets away in the infinite azure, from the grain of sand to the totality of creations, from first to last, it is true that all is passing away. _Sunt lachrymae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt._ The melancholy Heraclitus, whose philosophy allures while it saddens us, declares we never traverse the same river twice; the water over which we once crossed has long since sped away to the eternal seas. Seneca, centuries ago, noted the same of our own bodies; the process of dissolution is continuous, until at length the restorative power itself will desert us and the process will be complete.