“The feet of hoary time
Through their eternal course, have traveled o’er
No speechless, lifeless desert;”
and the confidence of the future is founded upon the promise that seed time and harvest, summer and winter, shall never fail.
This power in the beauties of the natural world to excite and gratify the imagination, is emphatically the poetry of nature, sending out its appeal from every object which greets the eye. There is poetry in the pathless wood, when the summer breeze sweeps over the waves of its dark green foliage—in the bold scenery of the mountain’s height, inspiring the soul with feelings of grandeur and sublimity—in the green valley throwing a charm of hallowed tranquility around the spirit. It dwells in the rising and the setting sun, in the wild flowers of the forest, in the mighty winds, in the dark blue skies, in the golden and silver clouds of heaven, in the rainbow, in the seasons.
“Coming ever more and going still, all fair,
And always new with bloom and fruit,
And fields of hoary grain.”
It is written like a legible language on the broad face of the unsleeping ocean. It dwells among the stars of heaven. It is abroad in the tempest, girt with the stern magnificence of the storm-cloud, careering on the vollied lightning, and uttering its voice of sublimity in the deep-toned thunder.
“’Tis in the gentle moonlight—