stillness becomes more and more impressive. At last I look—it is glorious! A pure bright star is marching through the field to the music of the spheres; and at the very instant predicted, even to the fraction of a second, it stalks across the wire and is gone. The song that was sung by the morning stars has been felt, and the heart, swelling with emotions too deep for the organs of speech, almost bursts with the unutterable anthem.
"The machinery by which the forces of the universe are regulated and controlled is exquisite; and if it be instructive to study the mechanism of a watch, or profitable to understand the principles of the steam-engine, the contrivances of man's puny intellect, how much more profitable and instructive must it be to look out upon the broad face of nature and study that machinery which was planned and arranged in the perfection of wisdom!
"If you be at first a little sceptical as to this order and arrangement, taking the harmonies of nature for discord, you will soon feel satisfied that the machinery of the universe—that mechanism which gives nature her powers to act—is, in all its parts, the expression of one thought, as much so as the works of a watch are of one design; that the same hand which weighed the earth and gave gravitation its force, adjusted the fibres of the little snowdrop and proportioned their strength.
"The forces displayed in the blade of grass, in the wing of the bird, and in the flaming path of the comet as it whirls around the sun, are all adjusted with equal nicety and care. Chance has nothing to do with the works of nature; yet there are many of her operations which, upon partial study only, do look like the results of accident. Botanists tell us of some: they say that certain plants have not the power of scattering their pollen—it is glutinous, and will not fly with the wind—but as the insects come to suck the flower it adheres to them;
