God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait, Give ermined knaves their hour of crime; Yet have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time!

Our toil is sweet with thankfulness, Our burden is our boon; The curse of earth's gray morning is The blessing of its noon.

Oh, talk as we may of beauty as a thing to be chiselled from marble or wrought out on canvas, speculate as we may upon its colors and outlines, what is it but an intellectual abstraction, after all? The heart feels a beauty of another kind; looking through the outward environment, it discovers a deeper and more real love-liness.

The continuity of life is never broken; the river flows onward and is lost to our sight, but under its new horizon it carries the same waters which it gathered under ours, and its unseen valleys are made glad by the offerings which are borne down to them from the past,--flowers, perchance, the germs of which its own waves had planted on the banks of Time.

With our sympathy for the wrongdoer we need the old Puritan and Quaker hatred of wrongdoing; with our just tolerance of men and opinions a righteous abhorrence of sin.

God's ways seem dark, but, soon or late, They touch the shining hills of day; The evil cannot brook delay, The good can well afford to wait, Give ermined knaves their hour of crime; Yet have the future grand and great, The safe appeal of Truth to Time!

Round the boles of the pine-wood the ground-laurel creeps, Unkissed of the sunshine, unbaptized of showers, With buds scarcely swelled, which should burst into flowers!