The spirit, if pure, finds friends in all things above and around it. It gazes upon the deep blue of heaven, and its calm; upon the high careering sun, and exults; upon the light floating cloud, and smiles in peace; upon the storm-rolling chariot, and trembles with awe. It looks forth upon the high mountain-tops in their solitary grandeur, and upon the stately forests in their dark sublimity, and forgets earth, with its mutability, littleness and folly. It looks upon the rich waving fields and green meadow lands--upon the quiet lake and the rushing stream--and this world’s darkness, and noise, and strife, fade from its remembrance. It beholds with a smile the circles of beauty and intelligence--the connexions of dignity and grace--the dwellings of purity and love--and the disappointments and sorrows of time vanish for awhile away. Yea, more--it turns its full and eagle eye upon the boundless ocean--that image of benignity and sovereignty, where Omnipotence rides alone on the whirlwind’s wing and directs the dashing storm, or where he sits enthroned in all the bright tranquility of peace and hope--and feels, itself in nature far, far superior to the vanities and vexations of its temporal existence, and yearns, with a quenchless energy, for the revelations and felicities of an infinite hereafter. But this contemplation of things material and inanimate still leaves a void behind; the heart is unsatiated and unconsoled. We turn to higher objects--to the kindred thoughts and feelings of cultivated men, and study, with a gushing sympathy, the records of their intellectual being. We behold them bursting the chains around them, bounding over the impediments in their path, scorning back to earth its native earthliness, and then unfold freely their golden wings and float away, far above the humiliation, and cares, and murkiness of this transient sphere, and move onward in imagination through the multiplying ages of immortal activity.