The Universalist. [volume] (Chicago [Ill.]) 1884-1897, 1888-08-04

and loss, everything that we love and
prize is so transient, man himself is so
fragile, his possessions so uncertain,
nature around him so liable to decay,
that a large part of literature seems to
resolve itself into one strain of unin-
Permitting elegy. Everything is pass
ing away,-youth, manhood, and age;
days, months, and years; powers of
mind, powers of body, powers of heart.
We stand amid the ruins of the past
ruins of former races, of past civiliza-
lions. Nothing comes so home to the
heart as the pathos which commem-
crates, in song, story, grafton, the
buried but unforgotten past,-past
youth, past love, past JOY
''The smiles. the tears
OF childhood's years,
The words of love then spoken;
The eyes which shone. now dim and gone,
The cheerful hearts now broken"
And, what is surprising, it is not age
or decay which affects this strain of
sentiment, and most enjoys the sad
sweetness of recollection; but youth
sings these pleasures of memory in
preference to those of hope. Every
young poet is pretty sure to begin his
career with a musical melancholy,
mourning over his disappointed hopes,
his buried loves and cruelty maltreated
expectations, and declaring himself
at the age of eighteen to have exhaust
ed life, and to live henceforth only in
the past. We all love to moralize by
the side of the brawling brook, and
compare it with the flight of time.
The night before the attack on Quebec,
Gen. Wolfe, as he was rowed in boat
on the st. Lawrence to reconnoiter the
enemy, repeated Gray's 'Elegy in a
Churchyard," then just published,
and declared he would rather be the
author of that poem than victor in the
approaching conflict. So congenial to
the human heart is the elegiac senti-
ment which dwells mournfully on the
past and on what it has taken away.
But 1 think if we can imagine this
feeling, we shall find the pleasure to
depend on our perception of the fact
that what we priced has not been
wholly taken from US; that we retain
it by the power of memory, and can
commune with it still in recollection.
And thus I will endeavor to show, that
what God has given us nothing ever
takes from US.
The beauties of nature which God
gives are permanent possession.
Every time you have seen a sunrise or
sunset, magnificent heaped-up mass
of clouds, the grand battery from
which the red lightning win presently
flash and the heavy artillery of heaven
will roar; or the ocean rolling on
the beach; or the yellow moonlight
sparkling on the lake; the immeasur-
able smile of the sea; the awful dome
of night, with its unchanging groups
of stars; little brook ripping over
stones; great mountain carrying on
its shoulders forests, glaciers, pastures,
fields of snow into the clouds; every
time we have seen through the CULVER
ering leaves the deep blue sky over our
head, with a little white cloud slowly
sailing through circumambient air, or
have gathered single flower, or watch
ed the changing foliage of autumn, or
the air filled with drifting snowfiakes,
every time we have seen any of these
phenomena, we have been fed with
food in our souls. There it is, within
the depths of our hearts,-a picture
such as no mortal painter ever execut-
ed. Prince Doria and Prince Borghese
have their picture galleries filled with
mas ter pieces of incalculable value;
but has not each one Of us in his mem
DRY better picture gallery than theirsp
They must leave theirs behind them
when they go, but we take ours with
us. Did Raphael ever paint the evan
escent smile we have all seen wander
ing over an infants lips, or the dreamy
gaze of its eyesp Who could ever
catch the divine light Of thought, of
devotion, of affection, which makes
the dullest features radiant with i'm
mortal glory? Day by day God pours
these treasures into our souls. A chief
difference between the joy we take in
nature and in other pleasures is that
the former lasts, that you do not tire
of nature. You enjoy a new house,
but tire of it. You have pleasure in a
new horse, new book, journey to
Europe; these things at last all tire.
But Nature never betrays the heart
that loves her. AS age advances, she
grows more dear and tender to the
heart.
STU more is this the case with beau
ty of character, beauty of soul, the
beauty of generous hearts and noble
lives, the beauty of divine self-sacrifiee,
or what the Scripture calls the beauty
of holiness. Welook back and remem-
Der the saints, the generous souls we
have known; and their beauty makes
the best part of our life. Whatever