O Blaavin, rocky Blaavin, It was with the strangest start That I felt, at the little querulous cry, A pulse that will live and beat, Blaavin, Till, standing around my bed, While the chirrup of birds is heard out in the dawn, The watchers whisper, He's dead! O another heart is mine, Blaavin, Sin' this time seven year, For Life is brighter by a charm, How I long to be with you again, To see in the scarlet sunrise The mist-wreaths perish with heat, The wet rock slide with a trickling gleam While toward the crimson islands, Where the sea-birds flutter and skirl, A cormorant flaps o'er a sleek ocean floor HERE may be a kind of poetical or Arcadian divinity drawn from the brightness of sunshine, and the rich enamel of flowers, and the deep dark blue of a sleeping lake. And, taking the glowing landscape as their page of theology, men may sketch to themselves God unlimited in His benevolence. But when the sunshine is succeeded by the darkness, and the flowers are withered, and the waters wrought into madness, can they find in the wrath and devastation that assurance of God's love, which they derived, unhesitatingly, from the calm and the beauty? The matter of fact we hold to be, that natural theology, at the best, is a system of uncertainties, a balancing of opposites. I should draw different conclusions from the genial breathings of one day, and the desolating simoom of the next. And though, when I had thrown me down on an Alpine summit, and looked forth on the clusterings of the grand and the lovely, canopied with an azure that was full of glory, a hope that my Creator loved me might have been gathered from scenery teeming with impresses of kindness, and apparently sending out from waving forests, and gushing fountains, and smiling villages, the anthem of an acknowledgment that God is infinitely beneficent; yet if, on a sudden, there passed around me the rushings of the hurricane, and there came up from the vallies the shrieks of an affrighted peasantry, and the torrents went down in their strength, sweeping away the labour of man's hands, and the corn and the wood which had crowned the fields as a diadem; oh, the confidence which had been given me, by an exhibition which appeared eloquent, of the benevolence of Godhead, would yield to horror and trepidation, whilst the Eternal One seemed walking before me, the tempest His voice, and the lightning His glance, and a fierce devastation in His every footprint! BE PROCRASTINATION. E wise to-day; 'tis madness to defer: Of man's miraculous mistakes, this bears L The thing they can't but purpose, they postpone. 'Tis not in folly not to scorn a fool, And scarce in human wisdom to do more. All promise is poor dilatory man, And that through every stage; when young, indeed, Unanxious for ourselves, and only wish. As duteous sons, our fathers were more wise. At thirty man suspects himself a fool; And why? because he thinks himself immortal. So dies in human hearts the thought of death: HE omnipresent Spirit perceives all but an infinite number of actions taking place together throughout the different regions of His empire. And by the end of the hour which has just begun, a greater number of operations will have been performed, which at this moment have not been performed, than the collective sum of all that has been done in this world since its creation. The hour just now begun may be exactly the period for finishing some great plan, or concluding some great dispensation, which thousands of years or ages have been advancing to its accomplishment. This may be the very hour in which a new world shall originate, or an ancient one sink in ruins. At this hour, such changes and phenomena may be displayed in some parts of the universe, as were never presented to the astonishment of the most ancient created minds. At this very hour the inhabitants of some remote orb may be roused by signs analogous to those which we anticipate to precede the final judgment, and in order to prepare them for such an event. This hour may somewhere begin or conclude mightier contests than Milton was able to imagine, and contests producing a more stupendous result; contests, in comparison of which those which shake Europe are more diminutive than those of the meanest insects. At this very hour thousands of amazing enterprises may be undertaken, and by the end of it a progress made, which to |