When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
     And trembling faith is changed to fear,
     The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
     Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!

     On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
     O Love Divine, forever dear,
     Content to suffer, while we know,
     Living and dying, Thou art near!

XII

A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without taking away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good opening in some honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our private satellite has had the opportunity of inspecting on the planet to which she belongs.  In some respects it was better to be a young Greek.  If we may trust the old marbles, my friend with his arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery of this metropolis,—­those Greek young men were of supreme beauty.  Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like necks, straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we ever see.  It may well be questioned whether the human shape will ever present itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry.  But the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that of the young American.  He had a string of legends, in place of our Gospels.  He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans, no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization.  Above all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day’s labor would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for only as gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of brawling streams.  Never, since man came into this atmosphere of oxygen and azote, was there anything like the condition of the young American of the nineteenth century.  Having in possession or in prospect the best part of half a world, with all its climates and soils to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke than fly with him day and night, so that he counts his journey not in miles, but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees them in his annual flights; with huge leviathans always ready to take him on their broad backs and push behind them with their pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not lies, is to be the noblest,