The sea, the deep blue sea, too, has its bounds that it cannot pass.
Its tides may ebb and flow, its bounding waves make music on their
winding shore, or heave in their giant strength, and dash their foam
and spray before the raging tempest, but they are curbed by that
Eternal fiat, which says, "So far shalt thou go and no farther," or
hushed by the same voice saying, "Peace, be still!"
Rivers run in their destined courses, and pay constant tribute to
old ocean, and even the sparkling brook that bubbles over its pebbly
bottom, dances not in vain, for the grass upon its margin assumes a
deeper green and marks the threading of its silver current.
The gentle dew that distils upon the tender herbage in the deep
silence of midnight, of the mist that rises from the bosom of
the earth, are not without design. The mountain rising in its
magnificence, the gently sloping hill and verdant vale, are so
arranged as to fill the mind of the beholder with satisfaction, while
the eye gazes upon the perfect harmony that pervades great nature's
works.
Every thing that is beautiful, every thing that is sublime, is
depicted in the order and perfection of the natural world, where each
has its appropriate sphere and fulfils its appropriate destiny.
This is a theme upon which the most powerful mind may expand itself,
stretching from thought to thought, and from object to object, without
grasping half the amazing whole. When we contemplate the forest
standing in silent grandeur, the tree, the shrub, the flower in all
its beautiful varieties, the rock, the precipice, the foaming cataract
that has thundered on for ages with the same deafening roar, and all
the ten thousand varied objects of inanimate creation, and observe
the nice regulations in which they are placed, we can but remark with
reverential awe, "In wisdom hast thou made them all.
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