“Oh, this is sublime!” I murmured, as I gazed upon the cloudy hosts moving across the heavens in battle array.

A gleam of lightning sprang forth from a dark cavern in the sky, and then, far off, rattled and jarred the echoing thunder.  Next came the rushing and roaring wind, bending the giant-limbed oaks as if they were but wands of willow, and tearing up lesser trees as a child tears up from its roots a weed or flower.

In this war of elements I stood, with my head bared, and clinging to a rock, mad with a strange and wild delight.

“Brilliant!  Sublime!  Grand beyond the power of descriptions” I said, as the storm deepened in intensity.

“An hour like this is worth all the commonplace, dull events of a lifetime.”

There came a stunning crash in the midst of a dazzling glare.  For some moments I was blinded.  When sight was restored, I saw, below me, the flames curling upward from a dwelling upon which the fierce lightning had fallen.

“What majesty! what awful sublimity!” said I, aloud.  I thought not of the pain, and terror, and death that reigned in the human habitation upon which the bolt of destruction had fallen, but of the sublime power displayed in the strife of the elements.

There was another change.  I no longer stood on the mountain, with the lightning and tempest around me; but was in the valley below, down upon which the storm had swept with devastating fury.  Fields of grain were level with the earth; houses destroyed; and the trophies of industry marred in a hundred ways.

“How sublime are the works of the tempest!” said a voice near me.  I turned, and the old man was again at my side.

But I did not respond to his words.

“What majesty!  What awful sublimity and power!” continued the old man.  “But,” he added, in a changed voice, “there is a higher power in the gentle rain than lies in the rushing tempest.  The power to destroy is an evil power, and has bounds beyond which it cannot go.  But the gentle rain that falls noiselessly to the earth, is the power of restoration and recreation.  See!”

I looked, and a mall lay upon the ground apparently lifeless.  He had been struck down by the lightning.  His pale face was upturned to the sky, and the rain shaken free from the cloudy skirts of the retiring storm, was falling upon it.  I continued to gaze upon the force of the prostrate man, until there came into it a flush of life.  Then his limbs quivered; he threw his arms about.  A groan issued from his constricted chest.  In a little while, he arose.

“Which is best?  Which is most to be loved and admired?” said the old Man.  “The wild, fierce, brilliant tempest, or the quiet rain that restores the image of life and beauty which the tempest has destroyed?  See!  The gentle breezes are beginning to move over the fields, and, hand in hand with the uplifting sunlight, to raise the rain that has been trodden beneath the crushing heel of