ment of a thirsty soul. The greenness of the grass and of the branch pointed to the beauty, the fleeting beauty of life; and now to the insecure prosperity of the unjust:-"He is green before the sun, and his branch shooteth forth in his garden; his roots are wrapped about the heap, and he seeth the place of stones. If he destroy him from his place, then it shall deny him, saying I have not seen him. Behold this is the joy of his way, and out of the earth shall others grow."

Every thing in nature, the flower—the wind-the spider's web-darkness and light-calm and tempest -drought and flood-the shadow and the noon-day heat a great rock in a weary land-every thing about us, and above us, acquired in this splendid and inimitable literature, a new and touching meaning; a meaning bound up with our lives; a worth coequal with our highest hopes, or most fervent desires. Everything became a moral and a warning. They were made to illustrate not only the operations of providence, but to cast a new light upon our intellectual being. They did not, indeed, speak out as to the exact value stamped upon man by the Deity, but they gave intimations more profound and startling than anything in the whole round of pagan philosophy. And then, there was an undertone of sorrow, a voice of plaintive regret over man—a delicacy and tenderness of phrase that wonderfully attracted and endeared. What ineffable melancholy is there in these following sentiments! What an intense longing after life, and yet, what a longing for death! What a vivid feeling of the grinding evils of mortal being; and what images of the fulness of peace in the grave!

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Why died I not from the womb? For now should I have lain still, and been quiet; I should have slept: then had I been at rest. With kings and counsellors of the earth, which had built desolate places for themselves; or with princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver; or, as a hidden, untimely birth, I had not been; as infants which never saw the light. There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners rest together, they hear not the voice of the oppressor. The small and the great is there; and the servant is free from his master. Wherefore is light given to him that is in misery; and life unto the bitter in soul? Which long for death, but it cometh not; and dig for it, more than for hid treasures? Which rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they can find the grave?" Job iii. 11—22.

But this new alliance with nature; this new and spiritual beauty cast upon everything, was not all. The magnificence of Creation and its phenomena were made tenfold conspicuous; and still beyond this, men were no longer left to suppose, or even to contend that the world was the workmanship of Deity. They were no longer left to bewilder themselves amongst a host of imaginary gods, the universe in its majesty and God- the one sublime and eternal founder and preserver of it, were flashed upon the spiritual vision in the broadest and brightest light. Here was seen the clear and continuous history of Creation :-God, the sole and immortal, sate upon the circle of the world, and its inhabitants were as grashoppers before him. The sun, moon, and stars were of his ordaining and appointing; night and day,

times and seasons revolved before him; his were the cattle on a thousand hills; his all the swarming tribes of humanity. The prophetic writings proclaimed his deity, his power and attributes, in language unparalleled in splendour, and with imagery which embraced all that is glorious, resplendent, beautiful and soothing, or dark, desolate and withering in nature.

Such was the effect of the Old Testament;-and then came the New !-then came Christ! The old shewed us the Deity in unspeakable majesty ;-his creation as beautiful and sublime;-Christ proclaimed him THE FATHER OF MEN; and in those words poured on earth a new light. The words which guaranteed the eternity of our spirits, chased a dimness from the sky which had hung there from the days of Adam: they rent down the curtains of death and oblivion, and let fall upon earth such a tide of sunshine as never warmed it till then. The atmosphere of heaven gushed down to earth. From that hour, a new and inextinguishable interest was given us in nature. It was the work of our Father: it was the birth-place of millions of everlasting souls. Its hills and valleys then smiled in an ethereal beauty, for they were then to our eyes spread out by a mighty and tender parent for our happy abodes. The waters ran with a voice of gladness; the clouds sailed over us with a new aspect of delight; the wind blew, and the leaves fluttered in it, and whispered every where of life-eternal consciousness-eternal enjoyment of intellect and of love. Through all things we paternal spirit diffused,

felt a portion of the divine, and "the wilderness and the solitary place" thenceforth had a language for our hearts full of the holy

peace and the revelations of eternity.

Then the

musing poet felt what it has been reserved for one in

our day only fully to express :

A presence that disturbed him with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean, and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

And rolls through all things. Therefore is he still
A lover of the meadows and the woods

And mountains; and of all that we behold

From this green earth: of all the mighty world
Of eye and ear, both what they half create
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of his purest thoughts; the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of his heart, and soul
Of all his moral being.

Thus, then, is dissipated the mystery of the more intense love of Nature evinced by the moderns than the ancients. It is but part of that gift of divine revelation which has endowed us with so many other advantages over those grand old philosophers of antiquity, who in the depth of their hearts, darkened and abused by many an hereditary superstition, yet found some of the unquenched embers of that fire of love and knowledge originally kindled there by the Creator, and cherished and fanned them into a noble flame. Had they heard from heaven these living words pronounced-GOD IS LOVE!-had they seen the great ladder of revelation reared from earth to heaven, and been permitted to trace every radiant step by which man is allowed to ascend from these lower regions

into the blaze of God's own paradise, their spirits would have kindled into as intense a glow as ours, and their vision have become as conscious of surrounding glories. GOD IS LOVE! These are words of miraculous power. Once assured that the very principle and source of all life is love, and that it is destined to cast its beams on our heads through eternal ages, we become filled with a felicity beyond the power of earthly evil. All those intimations that creation itself had given us, are confirmed. We feel the influence of the great principle of beneficence in the joy of our own being; in the cheerfulness of surrounding humanity; in the voices and songs of happy creatures; in the face of earth, and the lights of heaven. Seas, mountains, and forests, all become imbued with beauty as they are contemplated in love; and their aspects and their sounds fill us with sensations of happiness. When we read in the Phædon of Plato, the few and feeble grounds, as they now appear to us, on which that good old Socrates raised his arguments for the immortality of the soul; when we hear his exultation on discovering in Anaxagoras the principle laid down, that "the divine intellect was the cause of all beings," we feel with what deep transport he would have witnessed the gates of eternity set wide by the divine hand; and in what hues of heaven the very circumstance would have invested all about him. Yes! the only difference between modern literature and that of the ancients, lies in our grand advantage over them in this particular. It is from the literature of the Bible, and the heirship of immortality laid open to us in it, that we owe our enlarged conceptions of natural beauty, and our quickened affections towards the