There light and shade succeed no more by turns; There reigns th' eternal sun with an unclouded ray; There all is calm as night, yet all immortal day, Heaven, the perfection of all that can power, Thee, Lord! be sung. favoured creatures; of the saints, who are redeemed by the blood of His Son; and of the angels, who, innumerable in multitude, "stand round about His throne." It is the everlasting seat of consummate holiness or virtue; where that Divine principle shines without alloy, flourishes in immortal youth, and reigns and triumphs with eternal glory. It is the place in which are seen all the finishings of Divine workmanship, and in which the beauty and greatness of the Infinite Mind, and the endless diversities of omniscient skill, appear in all their most exquisite forms, and in the last degrees of refinement and perfection. It is the centre of all Divine communications; the city, in which all the O Father! Thee, whose wisdom, Thee, whose paths of Providence terminate; the ocean, from which all the streams of Infinite Wisdom and Goodness proceed, and into which they | return, to flow again and for ever. It is the theatre in which an eternal providence of progressive knowledge, power, and love, rendered daily more and more beautiful and amiable, wonderful and majestic, is begun and carried on through ages, which will never approach towards an end. It is the place where all the works of God are studied and understood, through an eternal progress of knowledge; where all the diversities of virtuous intelligence, all the forms and hues of moral beauty, brighten in an unceasing gradation; and where gratitude, love, enjoyment, and praise, resound day and night in a more and more perfect harmony throughout the immensity of duration. HEAVEN-Happiness of. Dwight. Thrice happy world, where gilded toys Whose love-all love, all power, all wisdom, Thou! What joy, what beauty must be there, Where in His glory shines the King, done, the sweet descants, the natural rising and falling, the doubling and redoubling of the nightingale's voice, might well be lifted above earth, and say, Lord, what music hast thou provided for the saints in heaven, when thou affordest bad men such music upon earth. Izaak Walton. HEAVEN-Raptures of. If one could but look awhile through the chinks of heaven's door, and see the beauty and bliss of Paradise; if he could but lay his ear to heaven, and hear the ravishing music of those seraphic spirits, and the anthems of praise which they sing; how would his soul be exhilirated and transported with joy ! HEAVEN-Recognition in. Watson. I must confess, as the experience of my own soul, that the expectation of loving my friends in heaven principally kindles my love to them while on earth. If I thought I should never know, and consequently never love them after this life, I should number them with temporal things, and love them as such; but I now delightfully converse with my pious friends, in a firm persuasion that I shall converse with them for ever; and I take comfort in those that are dead or absent, believing that I shall shortly meet them in heaven, and love them with a heavenly love. Baxter. HEAVEN-Song of. The song Of heaven is ever new; for daily, thus, HEAVENS-Nature's System of Divinity. scene. Then I begin to reflect upon my own insignificance, and to ask myself what I am, that the great Author of the universe should be mindful of me. His mercy, however, then presents itself to me, as well as His majesty, and the former affects me more than the latter. I listen to the bird which appears to be pouring forth his little tribute of gratitude and praise, and my heart prompts me to do the same. The very perfume of the flowers seems to be an incense ascending up to heaven; and with these feelings I am able to enjoy the calm tranquillity of the evening. Jesse. HEAVEN and EARTH. What matters it if thou art not happy on earth, provided thou art so in heaven? Heaven may have happiness as utterly unknown to us, as the gift of vision would be to a man born blind. If we consider the inlets of pleasure from five senses only, we may be sure that the same Being who created us could have given us five hundred, if He pleased. Mutual love, pure and exalted, founded on charms both mental and corporeal, as it constitutes the highest happiness on earth, may, for any thing we know to the contrary, also form the lowest happiness of heaven. And it would appear consonant with the administration of Pro- HELL-Definition of. HEAVENS-Pleasure of Surveying the. I invariably experience a variety of sensations when I "survey the heavens" on a calm clear night, about the end of the month of May. I can then inhale the sweets of the woodbine and other flowers, whose fragrance is drawn out by the gentle dews of evening. The nightingale breaks the silence by his sweet and varied notes; and the full moon "walking in brightness," and rendered still more beautiful by the lustre of so many shining stars, which appear in the wide-extended firmament, completes the loveliness of this nocturnal Colton. Adam. Hell, their fit habitation, fraught with fire Milton It is full knowledge of the truth, A dark And time, and place, are lost; where eldest Night And Chaos, ancestors of Nature, hold Milton. I'll tell thee what is hell-thy memory Thy gangrened heart, Stripped of its self-worn mask, and spread at last Bare, in its horrible anatomy, Before thine own excruciated gaze! HELL-Despair of. Starkey. HELL-a Vision of. The Fiend was seated; in his eye there shone He call'd the cursed, and they flash'd from cave And wild!-from dungeon and from den they came, And stood, an unimaginable mass Of spirits, agonized with sleepless pangs:- Before him, what a congregated host Ev'n thus in hell wander the restless damn'd; From scorching flames to chilling frosts they run; The darksome cave they enter, where they found HERO. Decision follow'd, as the thunderbolt HERO-the Master-spirit. Home. Ev'n to the dullest peasant standing by HERO-Triumph of the. In purple robes, With solemn state the magistrates proceed: The streets adorn'd, the doors with statues graced, Vast thronging crowds retard the great procession, Whose loud-repeated shouts divide the air; While flutt'ring birds their empty pinions shake. With garlands crown'd, the virgins strew the ways, And in glad hymns repeat his glorious name; HEROISM-Characteristics of. HISTORY. HISTORIAN-Province of the. Under the green foliage and blossoming fruit-trees of To-day, there lie, rotting slower or faster, the forests of all other Years and Days. Some have rotted fast, plants of annual growth, and are long since quite gone to inorganic mould; others are like the aloe, growths that last a thousand or three thousand years. You will find them in all stages of decay and preservation; down deep to the beginnings of the History of Man. Think where our Alphabetic Letters came from, where our Speech itself came from; the Cookeries we live by, the Masonries we lodge under! You will find fibrous roots of this day's occurrences among the dust of Cadmus and Trismegistus, of Tubalcain and Triptolemus; the tap-roots of them are with Father Adam himself and the cinders of Eve's first fire! At the bottom there is no perfect history; there is none such conceivable. All past Centuries have rotted down, and gone confusedly dumb and quiet, even as that Seventeenth is now threatening to do. Histories are as perfect as the Historian is wise, and it is gifted with an eye and a soul! For the leafy blossoming Present Time springs from the whole Past, remembered and unrememberable, so confusedly as we say :-and truly the Art of History, the grand difference between a Dryasdust and a sacred Poet, is very much even this :-To distinguish well what does still reach to the surface, and is alive and frondent for us; and what reaches no longer to the surface, but moulders safe underground, never to send forth leaves or fruit for mankind any more of the former we shall rejoice to hear; to hear of the latter will be an affliction to us; of the latter only Pedants and Dullards, and disastrous male-factors to the world, will find good to speak. By wise memory and by wise oblivion; it lies all there! Without oblivion there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past; when both are foolish and the general soul is overclouded with confusions, with unveracities and discords, here is a "Rushworthian chaos." Carlyle. HIGHLANDS-Feelings inspired by the. The delight of the Highlands is in the Highland feeling. That feeling is entirely destroyed by stages and regular progression. The waterfalls do not tell upon sober parties; it is tedious in the extreme to be drenched to the skin along high roads; the rattle of wheels blends meanly with thunder, and lightning is contemptible, seen from the window of a glass coach. To enjoy mist, you must be in the heart of it as a solitary hunter, shooter, or angler. Lightning is nothing unless a thousand feet below you, and the life-thunder must be heard leaping, as Byron says, from mountain to mountain, otherwise you might as well listen to a mock peal from the pit of a theatre. The Falls of the Clyde are majestic. Over Corra Linn the river rolls exultingly; and recovering itself from the headlong plunge, after some troubled struggles among the shattered cliffs, away it floats in stately pomp, dallying with the noble banks, and subsiding into a deep, bright, foaming current. Then, what woods and groves crowning the noble HISTORY-Advantages of. rocks! How cheerful looks the cottage spattered by the spray! and how vivid the verdure on each ivied ruin. The cooing of the cushats is a solemn accompaniment to the cataract, and aloft in heaven the choughs reply to that voice of the forest. Carlyle. History makes us some amends for the shortness of life. Skelton. Her ample page Gray. Professor Wilson. Rich with the spoils of time. 1 HISTORY-Imperfection of. Nothing is more delusive, or at least more wofully imperfect, than the suggestions of authentic history, as it is generally, or rather universally, written; and nothing more exaggerated than the impressions it conveys of the actual state and condition of those who live in its most agitated periods. The great public events of which alone it takes cognizance, have but little direct influence upon the body of the people; and do not, in general, form the principal business or happiness or misery even of those who are in some measure concerned in them. Even in the worst and most disastrous times-in periods of civil war and revolution, and public discord and oppression, a great part of the time of a great part of the people is spent in making love and money-in social amusement or professional industry-in schemes for worldly advancement or personal distinction, just as in periods of general peace and prosperity. Men court and marry very nearly as much in the one season as in the other, and are as merry at weddings and christenings-as gallant at balls and races -as busy in their studies and counting-houses -eat as heartily, in short, and sleep as soundly -prattle with their children as pleasantlyand thin their plantations and scold their servants as zealously, as if their contemporaries were not furnishing materials thus abundantly for the tragic muse of history. The quiet under-current of life, in short, keeps its deep and steady course in its eternal channels, unaffected, or but slightly disturbed, by the storms that agitate its surface; and while long tracts of time, in the history of every country, seem to the distant student of its annals to be darkened over with one thick and oppressive cloud of unbroken misery, the greater part of those who have lived through the whole acts of the tragedy, will be found to have enjoyed a fair average share of felicity, and to have been much less affected by the shocking events of their day, than those who know nothing else of it than that such events took place in ita course. Jeffrey. HISTORY-Knowledge of. History maketh a young man to be old, without either wrinkles or grey hairs, privileging him with the experience of age, without either the infirmities or inconveniences thereof. Fuller. HISTORY-Different Phases of. To be entirely just in our estimate of other azes is not only difficult-it is impossible. Even what is passing in our presence we see but through a glass darkly. The mind as well as the eye adds something of its own, before an image, even of the clearest object, can be painted upon it; and in historical inquiries, the most instructed thinkers have but a limited advantage over the most illiterate. Those who know the most approach least to agreement. The most careful investigations are diverging roads; the further men travel upon them, the greater the interval by which they are divided. In the eyes of David Hume, the history of the Saxon princes is "the scuffling of kites and crows." Father Newman would mortify the conceit of a degenerate England by pointing to the sixty saints and the hundred confessors who were trained in her royal palaces How vast a for the calendar of the blessed. chasm yawns between these two conceptions of the same era! Through what common term can the student pass from one into the other? Or, to take an instance yet more noticeable, the history of England scarcely interests Mr. Macaulay before the revolution of the seventeenth century. To Lord John Russell the Reformation was the first outcome from centuries of folly and ferocity; and Mr. Hallam's more temperate language softens without concealing a similar conclusion. The writers have all studied what they describe. Mr. Carlyle has studied the same subject with powers at least equal to theirs, and to him the greatness of English character was waning with the dawn of English literature; the race of heroes was already failing: the era of action was yielding before the era of speech. Froude. HISTORY-Province of. This is a great fault in a chronologer, Lingua. What is public history but a register of the successes and disappointments, the vices, the follies, and the quarrels, of those who engage in contention for power? Paley. HISTORY-Study of. To study history is to study literature. The biography of a nation embraces all its works. No trifle is to be neglected. A mouldering medal is a letter of twenty centuries. Antiquities, which have been beautifully called history defaced, composed its fullest commentary. In these wrecks of many storms, which time washes to the shore, the scholar looks patiently for treasures. The painting round a vase, the scribble on a wall, the wrath |
