Billeder på siden
PDF
ePub

conscious of the cause, they stimulate and soothe a flagging will or fainting heart, as the airs they purify search and reanimate an unstrung frame.

Swedenborg tells us that, in the verbal Scripture, mountains correspond to the truths of the highest plane. Certainly in the physical economy they are the eloquent types of charity. How impressive and cordial is the open fact that nothing in nature lives for itself,finds its end in itself! Nothing at least that is normal and healthful does. A slimy pond and a fen are typical of selfishness, not the river and the glebe. The sun is a mighty institution, of which heat, light, and gravitation are the ever-streaming discount. The sea gives the rain, as the interest of its vast fund, for the world's good. The beauty which gratifies and soothes humanity is the perpetual dividend of the joint-stock of the universe. And charity, which is the general lesson of nature, is preached by the sovereign hills with the emphasis of heroic and vicarious suffering.

Near one of the most inspiring views of the White Mountain range we have often seen a cottage, in which a family live with scarcely any furniture, and barely supplied even with summer necessities. The walls were not tight enough to keep out the rain and the winter • snows. The inmates, when we first visited them, were too poor to own a cow. The father had been continually unfortunate, though industrious and strictly temperate. The mother was in feeble health, and was plainly suffering from too low and spare a diet. The tones of her voice were saturated with misfortune. In winter, the man was afflicted with rheumatism so that he could not steadily earn his fifty cents a day by lumbering, when the snows were propitious; in the summer, he tried to wring enough to keep off starvation out of some cold, thin land. Although this is, no doubt, an exceptional case in that district, should it be a possible case in any district of this continent? Can we believe that there was an honest dollar of all the money hoarded in that county, so long as there was a man in it willing to work and unable to get a substantial living for his family by

his work,-living on the borders of stately forests, and suffering from cold in winter,-poorly clothed, while every bear on the neighboring heights was wrapped warm by the laws of nature,―impoverished in blood, when every weed that could fasten itself into a cranny of the rocks, where an inch of soil had lodged, had its portion of food supplied forthwith by an assessment on ocean, sun, and air?

Is it the written precept of the written Testament alone that intrudes this question? Mount Washington soared over that hut, and what did he say? What does, he do with the wealth lavished upon him? He is an almoner of divine gifts. He condenses moisture interfused in winds that blow from polar seas, and stores it up for fountains, or pours it in rills. He invigorates the breezes that sweep pestilence from our cities. He breasts the winter tempests, and

holds the snows with which they would smother him, and gives them slowly in the spring, letting the torrents tear his own substance also, to enrich the intervales of the Saco and Connecticut, and to keep the mills busy that help to clothe the world. A Greek sculptor had a wild dream of carving Mount Athos into a statue of Alexander,-its left arm to enclose a city of ten thousand, its right hand grasping an urn from which a river should pour perpetually into the sea. It is a bounty no less imperial that every great mountain represents. Nay, giving its own substance, too, in its disbursement of what is poured upon it, not withholding service though the condition be pain, it is tinged and glorified with light from the cross. In respect of the •symbolic meaning of the hills, far more than in relation to the depths they open to scientific and artistic scrutiny, we may quote the weighty words: "The truth of Nature is a part of the truth of God to him who does not search it out, darkness; to him who does, infinity."

!

« ForrigeFortsæt »