"Who there inhabit must have other powers,
Juices, and veins, and sense and life than ours;
One moment's cold like theirs would pierce the bone,
Freeze the heart's-blood, and turn us all to stone."

The power that journeys along the celestial spaces in the flashing
sunshine is beyond our comprehension. It accomplishes with ease
what man strives in vain to do with all his strength. At West Point
there are some links of a chain that was stretched across the river
to prevent British ships from ascending; these links were made
of two-and-a-quarter-inch iron. A powerful locomotive might tug
in vain at one of them and not stretch it the thousandth part of
an inch. But the heat of a single gas-burner, that glows with the
preserved sunlight of other ages, when suitably applied to the
link, stretches it with ease; such enormous power has a little
heat. There is a certain iron bridge across the Thames at London,
resting on arches. The warm sunshine, acting [Page 35] upon the
iron, stations its particles farther and farther apart. Since the
bottom cannot give way the arches must rise in the middle. As they
become longer they lift the whole bridge, and all the thundering
locomotives and miles of goods-trains cannot bring that bridge down
again until the power of the sunshine has been withdrawn. There is
Bunker Hill Monument, thirty-two feet square at the base, with an
elevation of two hundred and twenty feet. The sunshine of every
summer's day takes hold of that mighty pile of granite with its
aërial fingers, lengthens the side affected, and bends the whole
great mass as easily as one would bend a whipstock. A few years ago
we hung a plummet from the top of this monument to the bottom. At 9
A.M. it began to move toward the west; at noon it swung round toward
the north; in the afternoon it went east of where it first was, and