gloom and storm of that sunless season. Every spirit has peered out upon the watery grave of kings, of proud, aspiring nobles, whose generations ran directly back to Eden, and who still felt in the purple flood of life at their hearts the slowly diminishing impulses of the recent immortality of human nature. Genius, in eloquence, in song, or on the canvass, has often kindled over this theme and reaped fresh harvests of earthly immortality on this wide field of universal death. It is not our purpose to spread the glorious or the gloomy colors of fancy, in mingled drapery, over the deluge scenery. More true sublimity lurks in the account of this event given in the sacred records than may be found in the most labored, minute, or graphic displays of inventive probability. We follow the words of God; and, like the pioneer raven sent out from the window of the ark, hover a moment longer over this stormy resting place between the world's creation and its end.. The warning was long by the voice of Noah-and longer still by his unremitted labors in building the ark of safety for himself, his family, and those beasts of the field and fowls of the air who might be destined to propagate their kind thoughout the solitudes of the new world.Threatened judgment comes on tardy wing-for God is merciful beyond earthly conception of the most merciful. Arrived at last, it is sudden-as if the kind Creator of humanity was unwilling to hang out his protracted, unavailing terrors over those whose incorrigible obstinacy in sin had brought down destruction upon them. Many graphic writers, and the pencil of the artist, have united in presenting a picture of long continued struggle-the black agony of horrid death-the arduous ascent to the mountain summit-the wild shout of pursuing watersthe cutting off of every hope-the sight of the buoyant ark outriding the storm-and the wild, unutterable wrestlings of the spirit of despair, tormenting the drowning millions in their death struggle. But we cannot follow the path of such. The painter, whose heaving canvass discloses an enormous serpent winding himself around the topmost rock of the highest mountain, while all around roll the seething waters, reveals a strong probability of natureor when he paints a cataract near a summit where the laws of nature would forbid a river to flow-or when he defies the doctrine of gravitation and shows the angry, foaming masses of water,stretching upward, like reversed waterfalls, he may be sustained by the solemn evidence of recorded causes, if not effects. But let him people the last, the highest, visible elevations with drenched, miserable, living beings, he gives needless and uncalled-for severity to a judgment too tremendous to exaggerate. Long before the highest hills were topped with foam, all earthly life, except that afloat in the ark and that whose breath is the deep sea itself, had probably become extinct. When man punishes man, he sustains the poor, shivering form of his brother in slow torments, taking life in excruciating measures, inch by inch-but the judgments of God, slow in their approach, are sudden in their transaction. The calamity comes. The public mind seems stupified; and, in a moment, the Red Sea envelopes a host; the earth swallows thousands; fires from heaven wrap cities in flames; earthquake sinks them in dust, or the howling currents of the broken up seas and the dreary descent of floods from the opened windows of heaven finish the catastrophe of the world before the deluge. There is one point of lonely sublimity in this tragic event not yet delineated by the pencil. It is an after occurrence, when every earthly groan had long been hushed and the sea-weed shrouds had been woven around more millions than perhaps ever will find footing again at once upon our earth. The heavens had wept their last drop, and, with a pale blue aspect, reflected nothing but a heaving counterpart below-a dark mirror of unbroken waters, rolling to the lunar influence without a shore to graduate the tides. Those waters were receding. Evaporation lay upon their bosom, and curling mists, with a fragrance like freshly opened furrows of spring, floated on the dim edges of the horizon where sky and billow met, and there seemed to form mimic mountains, shadowy resemblances or mockeries of the world that was. From a window of the ark, a dark wing essays its flight. A raven, the first of birds to navigate the atmosphere fluid of the new world, comes out, after a year's confinement, and flaps his pinions between sea and sky. The flight of this pioneer, who returns no more, and the visionary line of vapor mountains towards which he directs his course, and the croaking of disappointment, as he finds them thin airtogether with the solemn silence of the buried creation below, form an assemblage of lonely, impressive images, more truly affecting than the fury and affright of the deluge onset. WESLEYAN MISSIONARY HYMN, Sung in the church in John-street, New-York, at the anniversary of the Methodist Missionary Society. See another angel flying O'er the broad Atlantic wave! Millions in the fountain lave. Now, a thousand trumpets thunder Fills with tears the sinner's eye. O'er the silver lake of Simcoe, Like the gush of Elim's well. Blessed Jesus! reign forever! Seated high on victory's car Hallelujah! Thou art Christ the morning star. SUMMERFIELD. THE Communion in which the beloved Summerfield labored, the entire community of the American church who had seen him, or heard of him, and thousands in Europe sorrowing for his untimely death, cut down as |