When he wants to illustrate the comfort of a powerful, unseen, though protective love, he tells us how, as a boy, he woke up one midsummer night and listened, with a sense of half-uneasy awe, to the wild cry of the marsh birds, whilst the moonlight streamed full into his room; and then, as he grew more and more disturbed, he suddenly heard his father clear his throat "a-hem," in the next room, and instantly that familiar sound restored his equanimity. The illustration is simple, but it hits the mark and goes home. His affectionate tributes to his father and mother are constantly breaking forth in spite of himself. "I thank God," he says, "for two things. First, that I was born and bred in the country, of parents that gave me a sound constitution and a noble example. I never can pay back what I got from my parents. Next I am thankful that I was brought up in circumstances where I never became acquainted with wickedness." How delightful it is to think of a man who, without a taint of conscious insincerity, but simply out of the fulness of his heart, can get up before four thousand people, and say: "I never was sullied in act, nor in thought when I was young. I grew up as pure as a woman. And I cannot express to God the thanks which I owe to my mother, and to my father, and to the great household of sisters and brothers among whom I lived. And the secondary knowledge of those wicked things which I have gained in later life in a professional way, I gained under such guards that it was not harmful to me." ... He has a wonderful way of importing his leisure hours into the pulpit, and making the great cooped-up multitude feel something of the joy and freshness of his own exhilaration. One golden day above others seems to have dwelt in his mind. He refers to it again and again. "When I walked one day on the top of Mt. Washington--glorious day of memory! Such another day I think I shall not experience till I stand on the battlements of the New Jerusalem--how I was discharged of all imperfections; the wide far-spreading country which lay beneath me in beauteous light, how heavenly it looked, and I communed with God. I had sweet tokens that he loved me. My very being rose right up into his nature. I walked with him, and the cities far and near of New York, and all the cities and villages which lay between it and me, with their thunder, the wrangling of human passions below me, were to me as if they were not."