By our aid,
consolation and succor, we must gather their voices into the chorus,
before, with perfect satisfaction, we can mingle in it our own.
Upon a Sabbath day, I walked amid all those charms and fascinations, in
which nature can bind us as in a spell. I passed through green aisles of
woods, that were ever-shadowed and made fragrant with every various
vegetable growth of this temperate northern clime; while the morning beam
of the sun in heaven fell brightly aslant the leaves and branches; and the
birds, that my lonely step startled from their perch or nest, flew from
glen to glen, making with their song, save the murmur of the breeze in the
boughs, the only sound I could hear. At length, the high-arched avenues of
this immense forest-cathedral let me out upon the broad, open shore,
where I saw and heard wave after wave break on the rocks, with shifting
splendor and that mellow thundering music which so saddens while it
delights. Solitude, verily, was stretched out asleep in the sun upon the
length of sandy beach and beetling promontory; and I sat and gazed now
over the boundless waters, now into the devouring abysses opened by the
bending crests of the billows, and anon into the gloomy depths of the
forest or the serene and measureless openings of the sky.
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