It was now night. The Heavens broadened round him in all the loving yet
august tranquillity of the season and the hour; the stars bathed the
living atmosphere with a solemn light; and above--about--around--

"The holy time was quiet as a nun Breathless with adoration." He looked
forth upon the deep and ineffable stillness of the night, and indulged
the reflections that it suggested.

"Ye mystic lights," said he soliloquizing: "worlds upon worlds--infinite-
-incalculable.--Bright defiers of rest and change, rolling for ever above
our petty sea of mortality, as, wave after wave, we fret forth our little
life, and sink into the black abyss;--can we look upon you, note your
appointed order, and your unvarying course, and not feel that we are
indeed the poorest puppets of an all-pervading and resistless destiny?
Shall we see throughout creation each marvel fulfilling its pre-ordered
fate--no wandering from its orbit--no variation in its seasons--and yet
imagine that the Arch-ordainer will hold back the tides He has sent from
their unseen source, at our miserable bidding? Shall we think that our
prayers can avert a doom woven with the skein of events? To change a
particle of our fate, might change the destiny of millions! Shall the
link forsake the chain, and yet the chain be unbroken? Away, then, with
our vague repinings, and our blind demands. All must walk onward to their
goal, be he the wisest who looks not one step behind. The colours of our
existence were doomed before our birth--our sorrows and our crimes;--
millions of ages back, when this hoary earth was peopled by other kinds,
yea! ere its atoms had formed one layer of its present soil, the Eternal
and the all-seeing Ruler of the universe, Destiny, or God, had here fixed
the moment of our birth and the limits of our career. What then is
crime?--Fate! What life?--Submission!"