great chain of truth, seems, in the enthusiasm of the vision, another step on that ladder by which man mounts from earth to heaven. Each hidden harmony which they discover in nature is another thought of the divine mind which they have conceived and understood, and serves to bind them still more closely in that communion into which the Creator permits them to enter with him. The consideration of man, the pleasures merely earthly which he controls and which belong to him, always temporal and always alloyed with pain, they can consent to relinquish, in the consciousness that they are entering into closer communion with him who is pure, perfect, and unchangeable. And their pleasures as much exceed those which they renounce, as the Creator is superior to the created. They have tasted the living stream of truth, whose waters refresh the more, the more they are drunk--they find themselves on the borders of that eternal spring whose course is infinite in extent. Whilst they follow its trace they secure immortality,--for none who drink of its waters shall ever die. See the student who dwells alone in his hermitage, or who perhaps nightly cribs his worn frame in some almost forgotten attic;--he is surrounded by circumstances which to the eye of the common observer denote the extremity of wretchedness and misery! Those who are more elevated by the pride of place and by the possession of those things which the world calls good, often look upon him with pity and contempt; and yet how rashly do they judge. Do they know whether he regards their pleasures or whither his aspirations would lead him. He looks out upon the stars, "those isles of light," which repose in the liquid blue of the vaulted heavens, and they speak to him of wisdom and love, of beauty and peace. He walks abroad amid the works of nature, and traces in all her hidden harmonies a beauty and a unity of design which speak but of one spirit, and that the infinite and eternal spirit of the universe. He begins indeed "to mingle with the universe;" and, like the mystic Egeria, a spirit of beauty pure and undefiled arises from the silent memorials of creative design, to commune with him in his morning walks and evening meditations. He compares the soul, which guides and animates the physical universe, with the vain and contentious spirit of his fellow man; he compares the order and beauty of the physical universe, which submits all its motions to the divine will, with the moral government of man,--at once the sport and the victim of his own caprices; and learns to despise what most men value, and to prize those pleasures {232} which they neglect. He has learnt to feel that He who rules all events, has considered him also, in his Providence; and willing to put his trust in that being, without whose knowledge "not a sparrow falleth to the ground," he stands forth the most self-humbled, and yet the most elevated of God's creatures.