Now stretch your eye off shore, o'er waters made
To cleanse the air, and bear the world's great trade,
To rise and wet the mountains near the sun,

Then back into themselves in rivers run,
Fulfilling mighty uses, far and wide,

Through earth, in air, or here, as ocean-tide.

Ho! how the giant heaves himself, and strains
And flings to break his strong and viewless chains;
Foams in his wrath; and at his prison doors,
Hark! hear him! how he beats, and tugs, and roars,
As if he would break forth again and sweep

Each living thing within his lowest deep.

Type of the Infinite! I look away

Over thy billows, and I cannot stay

My thought upon a resting-place, or make
A shore beyond my vision, where they break;
But on my spirit stretches, till 'tis pain
To think; then rests, and then puts forth again,
Thou hold'st me by a spell; and on thy beach
I feel all soul; and thoughts unmeasured reach
Far back beyond all date.

The dread command

Came, and thou swept'st to death the breathing land;

And then once more unto the silent heaven

Thy lone and melancholy voice was given.

R. H. DANA,

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AND though the land is thronged again, O sea!
Strange sadness touches all that goes with thee.
The small bird's plaining note, the wild, sharp call,
Share thine own spirit; it is sadness all !

How dark and stern upon thy waves looks down
Yonder tall cliff-he with the iron crown!

And see! those sable Pines along the steep,

Are come to join thy requiem, gloomy deep!

Like stoled monks, they stand and chant the dirge,
Over the dead, with thy low beating surge.

These are earth's uses. God has framed the whole,

Not mainly for the body, but the soul,

That it might dawn on beauty, and might grow
Noble in thought, from Nature's noble show;
Might gather from the bowers a humble mind,
And on earth's ever-varying surface find
Something to win to kind and freshening change,
And give the powers a wide and healthful range;
To furnish man sweet company where'er

He travels on a something to call dear

And more his own, because it makes a part

With that fair world that dwells within the heart.

R. H. DANA.

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CHAPTER XXV.

Voices of Winter and the Sea-The Wonders of the Snow-storm-The Moral and Disciplining Uses of Winter-God's way in the Sea and in Storms-The Benefits and Blessings of a state of Trial.

A SNOW-storm is in some respects one of the most beautiful scenes in nature, and at the same time, in its mightiest strength and severity, one of the sublimest and most awful. All the phenomena of frost and ice are magnificent with beauty and grandeur, and the prevalence of Winter in our globe, the recurrence of its scenes and doings, and the vast and sublime fixtures founded by it on the earth, and raised in shining mountains and glittering pinnacles to heaven, have an intimate connection with our moral sentiments. They were designed to do their part in the education of our race, so that some of the most important constitutional faculties and ideas of the mind could not without them have come to a complete development. They exert a powerful influence over the imagination, ministering to its riches and aggrandizement; over the heart also, and the judgment, over the sensitive and executive emotions and habits of an individual being, and in the distribution, formation, and discipline of society. Both the earth, and man upon it, would have been a

very different and a far inferior habitation and race, if Winter, with its desolate and stormy reign, had not constituted one of our four seasons. It was, therefore, a part of God's covenant of mercy with our race, that as long as the earth remaineth, not only seed-time and harvest, and day and night, and heat and summer, but also cold and winter, should never cease.

Some of the most wonderful exhibitions of the wisdom, power, and goodness of Almighty God are to be traced in a simple snow-storm. Who does not love to see the snow come

down? Perhaps the storm begins at night, having long been brooding and threatening. At first it is a timid sprinkling, but soon increasing fast, the thick snow-flakes fall in earnest. All night the storm prevails, but meanwhile as still and calm, as when a white winding sheet is laid over the body of a departed soul. In the morning how completely the world is changed! The hamlets, trees, fields, and the whole earth, are all covered with a wide expanse of snow, and the driving air is still one thick career of fleecy flakes, incessantly falling, and silently deepening over the earth, in a soft protecting mantle, fold upon fold, drift upon drift, till the tops of the highest fences are covered, the roads are filled up, and all the accustomed paths and landmarks disappear. How exquisite the beauty of the elemental play of white descending flakes in the sportive air, now coming down with a steadfast earnest regularity, and now whirled about, crosswise, in seeming chaos, now deposited in light fantastic curling drifts hanging to the eaves, and now in deep banks, ridges, and billows.

It is a scene of exquisite beauty. But we wish to consider the skill and care, divine and infinite, exercised in all these changes. to weave the folds of this wide-spreading storm, prepared with