Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears,"--

if it can so move some of us, who have cared to open the portals of our
hearts to receive and cherish the little waif,--why, verily, the simple
violet that blooms alike under every sky, the passing cloud that floats
changing ever over every land, gathering equal glories from the sunsets
of Italy and Labrador, are more potent missionaries of peace and
good-will to all the earth than the most persuasive accents of human
eloquence.

These are familiar truths. Like

"The stretchèd metre of an antique song,"

they flow from our grateful lips in ready words. But we do not suspect
how these manifestations of material Beauty are received by the
mysterious alembic of the soul,--how they are worked up there by
exquisite and subtile processes of moral chemistry, humanized,
spiritualized, and appropriated unconsciously to sweet uses of piety and
affection. We do not know how the star, the flower, the dear human face,
the movement of a wave, the song of a bird,--we do not know how these
things enter into the heart, become ideal, mingle with human emotions,
consecrate and are consecrated, and come forth once more into light, but
transfigured into tenderest sympathies and the gentle offices of charity
and grace. There was Wordsworth,--he knew something of this still
machinery, this "kiss of toothèd wheels" within the soul of man. Listen
to him,--he had been to Tintern Abbey and heard once more the "soft
inland murmur" of the Wye;--

"These beauteous forms,