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enable you to anticipate one of its thoughts or expressions, and yet each is natural and familiar as household words. Here about its coils forever the ancient enigma, so old and so unutterable. Behold! there is the sun, and the rain, and the rocks; the old sun, the old stones. How easy were it to describe all this fitly; yet no word can pass. Nature is a mute, and man, her articulate, speaking brother, lo! he also is a mute. Yet when Genius arrives, its speech is like a river; it has ne straining to describe, more than there is straining in nature to exist. When thought is best, there is most of it. Genius sheds wisdom like perfume, and advertises us that it flows out of a deeper source than the foregoing silence, that it knows so deeply and speaks so musically, because it is itself a mutation of the thing it describes. It is sun and moon and wave and fire in music, as astronomy is thought and harmony in masses of matter.

What is all history but the work of ideas, a record of the incomputible energy which his infinite aspirations infuse into man? Has anything grand and lasting been clone? Who did it? Plainly not any man, but all men: it was the prevalence and inundation of an idea. What brought the pilgrims here? One man says, civil liberty; another, the desire of founding a church; and a third discovers that the motive force was plantation and trade.