“These, as they change, ALMIGHTY FATHER, these Are but the _varied_ God. The rolling year Is full of thee. Forth in the pleasing spring THY beauty walks. THY tenderness and love Wide flush the fields; the softening air is balm; Echo the mountains round; the forest smiles; And every sense, and every heart is joy. Then comes THY glory in the summer-months, With light and heat refulgent. Then THY sun Shoots full perfection through the swelling year: And oft THY voice in dreadful thunder speaks; And oft at dawn, deep noon, or falling eve, By brooks and groves, in hollow-whispering gales. THY bounty shines in Autumn unconfin’d, And spreads a common feast for all that lives. In Winter awful THOU! with clouds and storms Around THEE thrown, tempest o’er tempest roll’d. Majestic darkness! on the whirlwind’s wing, Riding sublime, THOU bidst the world adore, And humblest nature with THY northern blast. Mysterious round! what skill, what force divine, Deep felt, in these appear! a simple train, Yet so delightful mix’d, with such kind art, Such beauty and beneficence combin’d; Shade, unperceiv’d, so softening into shade; And all so forming an harmonious whole; That, as they still succeed, they ravish still.” He who governs the whole frame of nature, and directs and regulates these successive changes, must possess almighty _power_, without which, he would be infinitely inadequate to the task. He who made the celestial orbs of such a prodigious bulk, and whirls them round with an almost incredible swiftness, causing the regular return of day and night, summer and winter, what can he not do? None among the mighty host of heaven, or among the inhabitants of the earth, can resist his power, or stay his arm when lifted up. He who created all things out of nothing, could, if he pleased, extinguish the lights of heaven, and shake the solid earth to atoms. How easily, then, can he stop our breath, break the slender thread of life, dissolve our feeble frame, or hurl guilty and impenitent sinners into the pit of destruction! He who brought darkness for the space of three days upon the Egyptians, and a dreadful tempest of forty days and forty nights upon the inhabitants of the old world, can make the days of the ungodly darkness, and their nights full of horror. He can strike them with “the arrow that flieth by day,” his swift pointed lightning; or with the pestilential vapors of the night, which “walk in darkness,” and give the deadly stroke unseen. “Lord, when my thoughtful soul surveys Fire, air, and earth, and stars and seas, I call them all thy slaves; Commissioned by my father’s will, Poison shall cure, or balm shall kill; Vernal suns or zephyr’s breath, May burn or blast the plants to death, That sharp _December saves_.