This power in the beauties of the natural world to excite and gratify the imagination, is emphatically the poetry of nature, sending out its appeal from every object which greets the eye. There is poetry in the pathless wood, when the summer breeze sweeps over the waves of its dark green foliage--in the bold scenery of the mountain’s height, inspiring the soul with feelings of grandeur and sublimity--in the green valley throwing a charm of hallowed tranquility around the spirit. It dwells in the rising and the setting sun, in the wild flowers of the forest, in the mighty winds, in the dark blue skies, in the golden and silver clouds of heaven, in the rainbow, in the seasons. “Coming ever more and going still, all fair, And always new with bloom and fruit, And fields of hoary grain.” It is written like a legible language on the broad face of the unsleeping ocean. It dwells among the stars of heaven. It is abroad in the tempest, girt with the stern magnificence of the storm-cloud, careering on the vollied lightning, and uttering its voice of sublimity in the deep-toned thunder. “’Tis in the gentle moonlight-- ’Tis floating mid day’s setting glories; night Wrapt in her sable robe, with silent step Comes to our bed and breathes it in our ears.” In all these dwells the spirit of poetry, and it is the highest office of the imagination, to extract from these the divine element. Is she the less able to do this, when from nature’s works she looks up with filial awe to nature’s God? By our admiration of the character and attributes of the Great Creator, are we led to regard the works of his hand, with emotions less enthusiastic and poetical? Strike out of our minds, when contemplating the features of the natural world, those ideas of system, order, and adaptation to wise and beneficent purposes so clearly expressed by them all--bid us ascribe all this glorious mechanism, so exquisitely formed and so skillfully arranged, to the unguided instinct of blind chance--and the tie that bound us in such an endearing relation to the scenes of earth, and sanctioned the communion of our better feelings with their ever eloquent spirit, is sundered for ever. There is a religion in every thing around us--and the spirit of poetry, that spirit which carries home to the imagination the pleasures of uncorrupted taste, is almost one and the same with the former. It is a religion which the creeds of men have never perverted, or their superstitions overshadowed. It is fresh from the hands of the Author, and is ever reminding us, with its still small voice, of the Great Spirit, whose presence pervades and quickens it. It glows from every star that sparkles in the far concave. It is among the hills and the vallies of the earth, where the desert mountain-top rears his snow-crowned summit into the frosts of an eternal winter, or the lowly dell slumbers in the quiet of a summer’s sun. It is this, uttering its