while ago, they were not; a little while, and they are not, their very ashes are not.
So has it been from the beginning, so will it be to the end. Generation after generation takes to itself the form of a body; and forth-issuing from Cimmerian night, on heaven's mission appears. What force and fire is in each he expends: One grinding in the mill of industry; one, hunter-like, climbing the giddy Alpine heights of science; one madly dashed in pieces on the rocks of strife, in war with his fellow:—and then the heaven-sent is recalled; his earthly vesture falls away, and soon even to sense becomes a vanished shadow. Thus, like some wild-flaming, wild-thundering train of heaven's artillery, does this mysterious Mankind thunder and flame, in long-drawn, quick-succeeding grandeur, through the unknown deep. Thus, like a God-created, fire-breathing spirit-host, we emerge from the inane; haste stormfnlly across the astonished earth; then plunge again into the inane. Earth's mountains are leveled, and her seas filled up, in our passage. Can the earth, which is but dead and a vision, resist spirits which have reality and are alive? On the hardest adamant some footprint of us is stamped in; the last rear of the host will read traces of the earliest van. But whence? O heaven, whither? Sense knows not; faith knows not; only that it is through mystery to mystery, from God and to God.
"We are such stuff
As dreams are made of, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep!"
GHOSES IN THE BARN
Lu B. Cake.
THE barn's haunted loft is gloomy and still;
The spider-webs cover the mold
Where sun-arrows shoot through holes in the roof
And rafters are lined with gold.
