tranquilly imbibe; so is it with that ancestral and master element called
Life. Lapped in your sleek comforts, and lolling on the sofa of your
patent conscience--when, perhaps for the first time, you look through the
glass of science upon one ghastly globule in the waters that heave
around, that fill up, with their succulence, the pores of earth, that
moisten every atom subject to your eyes or handled by your touch--you are
startled and dismayed; you say, mentally, "Can such things be? I never
dreamed of this before! I thought what was invisible to me was non-
existent in itself--I will remember this dread experiment." The next day
the experiment is forgotten.--The Chemist may purify the Globule--can
Science make pure the World?

Turn we now to the pleasant surface, seen in the whole, broad and fair to
the common eye. Who would judge well of God's great designs, if he could
look on no drop pendent from the rose-tree, or sparkling in the sun,
without the help of his solar microscope?

It is ten years after the night on which William Gawtrey perished:--I
transport you, reader, to the fairest scenes in England,--scenes
consecrated by the only true pastoral poetry we have known to
Contemplation and Repose.

Autumn had begun to tinge the foliage on the banks of Winandermere. It
had been a summer of unusual warmth and beauty; and if that year you had
visited the English lakes, you might, from time to time, amidst the
groups of happy idlers you encountered, have singled out two persons for
interest, or, perhaps, for envy. Two who might have seemed to you in
peculiar harmony with those serene and soft retreats, both young--both
beautiful. Lovers you would have guessed them to be; but such lovers as
Fletcher might have placed under the care of his "Holy Shepherdess"--