Nothing is more moving to man than the spectacle of reconciliation: our weaknesses are thus indemnified, and are not too costly--being the price we pay for the hour of forgiveness: and the archangel, who has never felt anger, has reason to envy the man who subdues it. When thou forgivest,--the man, who has pierced thy heart, stands to thee in the relation of the sea-worm that perforates the shell of the muscle, which straightway closes the wound with a pearl. * * * The graves of the best of men, of the noblest martyrs, are like the graves of the Herrnhuters (the Moravian brethren)--level, and undistinguishable from the universal earth: and, if the earth could give up her secrets, our whole globe would appear a Westminster Abbey laid flat. Ah! what a multitude of tears, what myriads of bloody drops have been shed in secrecy about the three corner-trees of earth,--the tree of life, the tree of knowledge, and the tree of freedom,--shed, but never reckoned! It is only great periods of calamity that reveal to us our great men, as comets are revealed by total eclipses of the sun. Not merely upon the field of battle, but also upon the consecrated soil of virtue--and upon the classic ground of truth, thousands of _nameless_ heroes must fall and struggle to build up the footstool from which history surveys the _one_ hero, whose name is embalmed, bleeding--conquering--and resplendent. The grandest of heroic deeds are those which are performed within four walls and in domestic privacy. And, because history records only the self-sacrifices of the male sex, and because she dips her pen only in blood,--therefore is it that in the eyes of the unseen spirit of the world our annals appear doubtless far more beautiful and noble than in our own. THE GRANDEUR OF MAN IN HIS LITTLENESS. Man upon this earth would be vanity and hollowness, dust and ashes, vapor and a bubble,--were it not that he felt himself to be so. That it is possible for him to harbor such a feeling,--_this_, by implying a comparison of himself with something higher in himself, _this_ is it which makes him the immortal creature that he is. NIGHT. The earth is every day overspread with the veil of night for the same reason as the cages of birds are darkened,--namely, that we may the more readily apprehend the higher harmonies of thought in the hush and quiet of darkness. Thoughts, which day turns into smoke and mist, stand about us in the night as lights and flames: even as the column which fluctuates above the crater of Vesuvius, in the daytime appears a pillar of cloud, but by night a pillar of fire. THE STARS.