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So sweet we know not we are listening to it.
But I awake, and with a busier mind
And active will, self-conscious, offer now,
Not as before, involuntary prayer
And passive adoration.

Hand and voice

Awake, awake! and thou, my heart, awake!
Green fields, and icy cliffs! all join my hymn!
And thou, O silent mountain, sole and bare,
O! blacker than the darkness, all the night,
And visited all night by troops of stars,
Or when they climb the sky, or when they sink,
Companion of the morning star at dawn,
Co-herald! wake, oh wake, and utter praise!
Who sank thy sunless pillars in the earth.
Who filled thy countenance with rosy light?
Who made thee father of perpetual streams?
And you, ye five wild torrents fiercely glad,
Who called you forth from night and utter death?
From darkness let you loose, and icy dens,
Down those precipitous, black, jagged rocks
Forever shattered and the same forever?
Who gave you your invulnerable life,

Your strength, your speed, your fury, and your joy,
Unceasing thunder and eternal foams-

And who commanded, and the silence came,
"Here shall the billows stiffen and have rest?"
Ye ice-falls! ye that from your dizzy heights
Adown enormous ravines steeply slope-
Torrents, methinks, that heard a mighty noise,
And stopped at once amidst their maddest plunge.
Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!

Who made you glorious as the gates of heaven
Beneath the keen full moon? Who bade the sun
Clothe you with rainbows? Who with lovely flowers
Of living blue spread garlands at your feet?
God! God! the torrents like a shout of nations
Utter; the ice-plain bursts, and answers, God!—
God! sing the meadow streams with gladsome voice
And pine groves with their soft and soul-like sound!
The silent snow-mass, loosening, thunders, God!
Ye dreadless flowers, that fringe the eternal frost !

Melody, delicious song, mellifluous strain.

Awake, break the enchantment, come out of the revery. .Busier, livelier, faculties more engaged.

Offer, give, reach out, raise up.

Involuntary, instinctive, without the exercise of will. What inspired poet calls upon all things to praise God? See Ps. 148.

Hand and voice, visible signs of prayer and praise. Heart, all my affections and sympathies.

Blacker, darker, an image similar to the "blackness of darkness.'

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Troops of stars, clusters, constellations, image taken from troops of soldiers.

Sink, fall from the zenith, go down from the meridian. Co-herald, associated crier, joined with the morning

star.

Sunless, unvisited by the sun, impervious to his rays.
Rosy, fragrant, whence the origin of the allusion?
Father, source, origin, instrumental cause.
.Perpetual, constant, never-failing, perennial.
Torrents, roaring, dashing streams.

Glad. Why are streams said to be affected with joy?
-Utter, proclaim, announce, deepest, profoundest.
.Precipitous, headlong, steep, like a precipice.
Jagged, jag'-gêd, uneven, denticulated, rough.
.Invulnerable, invincible, not pervious to wounds.
What are the characteristics of this description?
Why are the waters likened to thunder?
Here shall, &c, See Job 38: 11. Jer. 5: 22.
Ice-falls, masses of ice exposed to fall.

Dizzy, high, lofty, giddy.

Enormous, very large, immeasurable, wicked.

Stopped, suddenly frozen, instantly congealed.

Maddest, wildest, most insane.

Cataracts, falls of water, hardened and steep masses

of ice.

Gates of heaven, Rev. xxi. 21. Describe them.

Keen, sharp, beaming bright, clear.

Bade, båd, commanded, ordered.

Clothe, adorn, deck. Is it used figuratively, or not? Rainbows. For the source of this imagery, see Rev.

Ye wild goats, bounding by the eagle's nest!
Ye eagles, playmates of the mountain blast!
Ye lightnings, the dread arrows of the clouds,
Ye signs and wonders of the elements,
Utter forth God! and fill the hills with praise!
And thou, oh silent form, alone and bare,
Whom as I lift again my head, bowed low
In silent adoration, I again behold,

And lo, thy summit upward from the base
Sweep slowly, with dim eyes suffused with tears,-
Awake thou mountain form! Rise like a cloud,
Rise, like a cloud of incense, from the earth!
Thou kingly spirit, throned among the hills,
Thou dread Ambassador from earth to heaven,
Great Hierarch, tell thou the silent sky,
And tell the stars, and tell the rising sun,
Earth with her thousand voices calls on God.

LESSON LXIV.

Practical effects of an unrestrained Imagination.-BRA

MAN.

Breaking loose from the restraints of reason, and the tyranny of unyielding fact, where the light of experience cannot follow her, imagination melts away the. midnight of our prospects; and forms scenes of enchanting lustre and beauty, where hope expires in the rapture which nourished it. She builds a fabric of happiness on all future years of life, and as one portion after another of them rolls away, this fabric tumbles, piecemeal, to ruins. She binds together in a robe of joy, the succession of future moments, which man in the sober and toilsome progress of life, must unravel, and bind up again in sorrow. What object of human ambition has she not wrapt in illusion? Where is the sagacity which she has not eluded? where is the wisdom which she has not taken captive, and equipped herself in its spoils ? where is the proud and mighty intelligence, over which she has not held a voluntary, but omnipotent mastery?

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Garlands, wreaths of branches or flowers.
.Gladsome, jocund, joyful, glad, exulting.
-Soul-like, still, rational, intelligent, gentle.
-Dreadless, fearless, blooming without danger.
Eagle's nest.

Where does the eagle build his nest? Of what is the eagle an emblem ?

-Mountain, lofty eminence, high, soaring.

-Blast, sudden gust of wind, mildew, explosion of a mine.

-Arrows, javelins. What resemblance between light-
nings and arrows?

Elements, first principles, air, earth, fire and water.
Spell again, å-gên, cloud, cloud.

Adoration, praise, homage, reverential worship.
-Base, foundation, low, vile, to found.

Suffused, dimmed, moistened.

-Incense, perfume offered upon a shrine, provoke. Throned, placed, seated. Whence the allusion? Is it a bold one?

Ambassador, legate, delegate, minister plenipotentia

ry.

.Hierarch, hi' è-rårk, the chief of a sacred order.
Silent, still. Why is the sky said to be silent?
What are the great excellencies of this piece of poetry?
.Tyranny, tir rân-è, rigorous command, severity.
Imagination, power of representing absent things.
Enchanting, bewitching, charming, bewildering, fas-
cinating.

Rapture, ecstacy, transport, violence of passion.
Fabric, fåb' rick, building, edifice.

She builds. To what is imagination here likened ?

Rolls away. Years of life are compared to what?
Piece-meal, in fragments, in pieces.

Unravel, disentangle, extricate, clear.

-Wrapt, rolled together, bound up, transported.
Eluded, escaped, outwitted, been too cunning for.

.Sagacity, wisdom, cunning, discretion.

Equipped, armed. What does Imagination become
like here?

Voluntary, willing, acting without compulsion.
Mastery, power, control, superiority; from master.
Omnipotent, most powerful, almighty; proper only
to the Creator.

Who, among the most stern of all the sons of science, has she not mocked with fantastic dreams? The path of every man, down to the regions of death, is marked with the ruin of withered hopes, and the dissolution of bright prospects. He sometimes looks back and finds the gloom of his track relieved here and there, with the fragments of scattered visions,-luminous spots which guide the lingering memory down his past years, till it is lost in the darkness of his original. What does he do in this pause of reason, when the phantom, which deluded him is broken, when the brightness which dwelt on his vision is extinct, and he sees under it the grave of his happy expectations, like the fleeing away of that glaring and vapoury radiance, which exhales from the rottenness of death? From those gleams of light, which burst on the retrospection of memory, fancy kindles anew her fires; she glows with new fervor, expands into new images of magnificence, drags down rebellious reason from its throne, and binds it into a reluctant, half-consenting, willing, delightful slavery; he follows her down to the vale of death,—she starts back from the cold, immoveable form of the monarch of dissolution, and flies away forever. There is always going on a reciprocal agency between the imagination and the passions. It is the action of the former that swells the latter to mighty force, and immense magnitude. The great poet of the present day, is a striking example of this truth. How bitterly does he complain of a soul, scorched, and withered by its heart's fire! Other poets can expand their minds to the broad impress of nature, and feel satisfied; but not so with him. He gazes till his whole soul is transfused into the object of his contemplation. He does not rest satisfied till he has breathed his spirit into the cumbrous mass of inert matter, and felt it heave and groan with mental life. He has a restless and insane thirsting after the whole riches of the moral and material world, and an aspiration to enlarge himself to ubiquity. In him is mingled the strongest desire of life, with an utter loathing of every object for which it is worth preservation.

Who has not felt the power of his imagination? who, when he has encountered some of those strange

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