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“How calm and beautiful!” said a voice near me. I turned, and one whose days were in the “sear and yellow leaf,” stood by my side.

“But all is tame and commonplace,” I answered. “We have this over and over again, day after day, month after month, and year after year. Give me something brilliant and startling, if it be in the fiery comet or the rushing storm. I am sick of the commonplace!”

“And yet to the commonplace the world is indebted for every great work and great blessing. For everything good, and true, and beautiful!”

I looked earnestly into the face of the old man. He went on.

“The truly good and great is the useful; for in that is the Divine image. Softly and unobtrusively has the dew fallen, as it falls night after night. Silently it distilled, while the vagrant meteors threw their lines of dazzling light across the sky, and men looked up at them in wonder and admiration. And now the soft grass, the green leaves, and the sweet flowers, that drooped beneath the fervent heat of yesterday, are fresh again and full of beauty, ready to receive the light and warmth of the risen sun, and expand with, a new vigor. All this may be tame, and commonplace; but is it not a great and a good work that has been going on?

“The tiller of the soil is going forth again to his work. Do not turn your eyes from him, and let a feeling of impatience stir in your heart because he is not a soldier rushing to battle, or a brilliant orator holding thousands enchained by the power of a fervid eloquence that is born not so much of good desires for his fellow-men as from the heat of his own self-love. Day after day, as now, patient, and hopeful, the husbandman enters upon the work that lies before him, and, hand in hand with God’s blessed sunshine, dews, and rain, a loving and earnest co-laborer, brings forth from earth’s treasure-house of blessings good gifts for his fellow-men. Is all this commonplace? How great and good is the commonplace!”

I turned to answer the old man, but he was gone. I was standing on a high mountain, and beneath me, as far as the eye could reach, were stretched broad and richly cultivated fields; and from a hundred farm-houses went up the curling smoke from the fires of industry. Fields were waving with golden grain, and trees bending with their treasures of fruit. Suddenly, the bright sun was veiled in clouds, that came whirling up from the horizon in dark and broken masses, and throwing a deep shadow over the landscape just before bathed in light. Calmly had I surveyed the peaceful scene spread out before me. I was charmed with its quiet beauty. But now, stronger emotions stirred within me.

“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.