_The Alpine Violet._
Mid Alpine wilds and thick-descending snows,
Where massive hights uplift their towering crest,
Adown whose rugged sides no verdure glows,
And e’en a feathery flake could scarcely rest;
Fearless alike of winter’s rudest shock,
Impending glaciers, or the tempest wild,
On the stern side of that cloud-piercing rock,
A single violet looked up and smiled.
Some might have said, ’twas “born to blush unseen,
And waste its sweetness on the desert air;”
But no! Heaven’s light shone in its humble mien,
And He was pleased who placed the floweret there.
So I, a human flower, am bid to grow,
Mayhap, in life’s most wild, sequestered spot,
Where Sorrow’s rudest tempests fiercely blow,
And woes accumulate o’ershade my lot.
Yet even here, alone and sadly chilled,
Nor known, nor noticed by the passing gaze,
Like that lone violet, I too may yield
To Heaven a silent offering of praise.
Earth may not know that I have ever been;
Yet pleasure to the eye of Heaven to give,
And thence, one sweet, approving smile to win,
Is, sure, no worthless mission to achieve.
Ib.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
Instruction.
_Whoso is wise and will observe these things, even they
shall understand the loving-kindness of the Lord.
—Psalm 107: 43._
January! Darkness and light reign alike. Snow is on the frozen ground.
Cold is in the air. The winter is blossoming in frost-flowers. Why is
the ground hidden? Why is the earth white? So hath God wiped out the
past: so hath he spread the earth, like an unwritten page, for a new
year! Old sounds are silent in the forest and in the air. Insects are
dead, birds are gone, leaves have perished, and all the foundations of
soil remain. Upon this lies, white and tranquil, the emblem of newness
and purity, the virgin robes of the yet unstained year!
April! The singing month. Many voices of many birds call for
resurrection over the graves of flowers, and they come forth. Go, see
what they have lost. What have ice and snow and storm done unto them?
How did they fall into the earth stripped and bare? How do they come
forth opening and glorified? Is it then so fearful a thing to lie in
the grave?
In its wild career, shaking and scourged of storms through its orbit,
the earth has scattered away no treasures. The hand that governs in
April governed in January. You have not lost what God has only hidden.
You lose nothing in struggle, in trial, in bitter distress. If called
to shed thy joys as trees shed their leaves; if the affections be
driven back into the heart, as the life of flowers to their roots, yet
be patient. Thou shalt lift up thy leaf-covered boughs again. Thou
shalt shoot forth from thy roots new flowers. Be patient! Wait!
Beecher.
* * * * *
The sun had gone down before we entered the valley of Chamouni; the sky
behind the mountain was clear, and it seemed for a few moments as if
darkness was rapidly coming on. On our right hand were black, jagged,
furrowed walls of mountain, and on our left Mont Blanc, with his
fields of glaciers and worlds of snow; they seemed to hem us in and
almost press us down. But in a few moments commenced a scene of
transfiguration, more glorious than any thing I had witnessed yet. The
cold, white, dismal fields gradually changed into hues of the most
beautiful rose-color. A bank of white clouds, which rested above the
mountains, kindled and glowed, as if some spirit of light had entered
into them. You did not lose your idea of the dazzling, spiritual
whiteness of the snow, yet you seemed to see it through a rosy vail.
The sharp edges of the glaciers and the hollows between the peaks
reflected wavering tints of lilac and purple. The effect was solemn
and spiritual beyond any thing I had ever seen. These words, which had
often been in my mind during the day, and which occurred to me more
often than any others while I was traveling through the Alps, came into
my mind with a pomp and magnificence of meaning unknown before:—“For
by Him were all things created that are in heaven and that are in
earth, visible and invisible, whether they be thrones, or dominions, or
principalities, or powers; all things were created by him and for him;
and he is before all things, and by him all things consist.”
In this dazzling revelation I saw not that cold, distant, unfeeling
fate, or that crushing regularity of wisdom and power, which was all
the ancient Greek or modern deist can behold in God; but I beheld,
as it were, crowned and glorified, one who had loved with our loves,
and suffered with our sufferings. Those shining snows were as his
garments on the Mount of Transfiguration, and that serene and ineffable
atmosphere of tenderness and beauty, which seemed to change these
dreary deserts into worlds of heavenly light, was to me an image of the
light shed by his eternal love on the sins and sorrows of time, and the
dread abyss of eternity.
Sunny Memories.
* * * * *
It is painful to think how our youth are coming to maturity without
looking into these Treasure Houses of the King. The Bible and nature
are mutually illustrative. And he has not a full Christian nature, who
can not profoundly read and intensely enjoy both. As one has said of
the book of nature,—and it might equally have been said of the Book of
grace;—“The casual and general observer of nature soon ceases to be
interested, because he looks only at the surface, and soon exhausts all
the novelties. He merely stands on the outside of the temple, and,
after gazing for a time at its noble proportions and splendid columns,
his interest subsides. But he who really studies the works of God
because he loves them is admitted into the penetralia, and there ten
thousand new objects reward his search, opening continually before him,
until he reaches the very Holy of Holies, and becomes a consecrated
Priest.” Education, then, consists in forming rather than in informing.
Its two chief instruments are, not the wisdom of men, nor classical
literature, but God’s works and God’s Book. Science without Revelation
is of doubtful value. Revelation without Science is not seen in its
fullness.
Let the snow-flake preach Sinai and Calvary, Eden and Gethsemane, the
first and the second Adam. In its purity and beauty, its freshness
and its bounty, it shows what a world this was when God made it. But
when we see it rushing in the turbid stream, rolling in the dreadful
avalanche, to bury the homes and possessions of men with their
owners,—when we see it sullied and stained,—let us learn that man is
fallen, that a curse is upon the earth and its lord, that “the whole
creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together.”
Kirk.
_God in Nature._
What prodigies can Power divine perform
More grand than it produces year by year,
And all in sight of inattentive man!
Familiar with the effect, we slight the cause,
And in the constancy of Nature’s course,
And regular return of genial months,
And renovation of a faded world,
See naught to wonder at. Should God again,
As once in Gibeon, interrupt the race
Of the undeviating and punctual sun,
How would the world admire! But speaks it less
An agency divine to make him know
His moment when to sink and when to rise,
Age after age, than to arrest his course?
All we behold is miracle; but seen
So duly, all is miracle in vain.
All this uniform uncolored scene
Shall be dismantled of its fleecy load
And flush into variety again.
From dearth to plenty, and from death to life,
Is Nature’s progress when she lectures man
In heavenly truth; evincing, as she makes
The grand transition, that there lives and works
A soul in all things, and that soul is God.
The beauties of the wilderness are his,
That make so gay the solitary place
Where no eye sees them; and the fairer forms
That cultivation glories in are his.
He sets the bright procession on its way,
And marshals all the order of the year:
He marks the bounds which Winter may not pass
And blunts its pointed fury; in its case,
Russet and rude, folds up the tender germ,
Uninjured, with inimitable art;
And, ere one flowering season fades and dies,
Designs the blooming wonder of the next.
Cowper.
_Teachings of Nature._
Look on this beautiful World and read the truth
In her fair page; see, every season brings
New change to her of everlasting youth;
Still the green soil with joyous living things
Swarms; the wide air is full of joyous wings;
And myriads still are happy in the sleep
Of Ocean’s azure gulfs, and where he flings
The restless surge. Eternal love doth keep,
In his complacent arms, the earth, the air, the deep.
Will, then, the Merciful One, who stamped our race
With his own image, and who gave them sway
O’er earth, and the glad dwellers on her face,
Now that our swarming nations far away
Are spread, where’er the moist earth drinks the day,
Forget the ancient care that taught and nursed
His latest offspring? Will he quench the ray,
Infused by his own forming smile at first,
And leave a work so fair all blighted and accursed?
Oh, no! a thousand cheerful omens give
Hope of yet happier days, whose dawn is nigh.
He who has tamed the elements shall not live
The slave of his own passions; he whose eye
Unwinds the eternal dances of the sky,
And in the abyss of brightness dares to span
The sun’s broad circle, rising yet more high,—
In God’s magnificent works his will shall scan,
And love and peace shall make their paradise with man.
W. C. Bryant.