"The Voyage of Life" impressed me somewhat as the voyage itself does.
Especially the cold, subdued tone of the last, which suggests infinity by
the tone merely. Perhaps you have not seen them, and will suffer a brief
account. The pictures are four. The first represents a boat of golden prow
and sides wrought into the images of the hours, bearing an infant in a bed
of roses, and issuing from a dim cave in a dark, indefinable mountain, and
hasting down a flower-crowned stream. The second shows the babe grown to
manhood, and, assuming himself the guidance, leaves the guardian spirit
upon the bank, and upon a wider stream, piercing a wider prospect, sails
away, allured by a dim cloud-castle which seems to hang over the river,
yet from which the stream turns. The next shows him dashing along amid
clouds and whirlpools and tempests, without rudder or compass, towards
threatening rocks, yet serenely, with clasped hands, abiding the issue. In
the last, grown to old age, he sails forth upon a fathomless, shoreless
sea, leaving behind all rocks and tempests, while the guardian angel again
at the helm points to regions of cloudless day. Though very beautiful of
themselves, they suggested to me grander pictures of this grandest theme,
and so interested me very much.

Truly there is nothing final; all is suggestive. When, entranced in summer
woods, we demand that nature lend our homes somewhat of her beauty, she
replies to us that beauty is so subtle, residing not in the green of this
leaf nor in the curve of that branch, and not in the whole, but in the
soul that contemplates it, that of herself she has none, and that we her
lovers have invested her with such golden charms. The universal wish to
realize is only typified by the grasping gain. Most men live to
acknowledge in heart the superiority of young dreams over old possessions;
and the world feels that in the unshrinking aspirations of the youth lies
the hope of the world. That is the lightning that purifies the dense
atmosphere, and, glancing for an instant, reveals the keenest light known