Yet, more than this:  I strive to grope, with dull, earthy sense, at her freed life in that earnest land where souls forget to hunger or to hope, and learn to be.  And so thinking, the certainty of her aim and work and love yonder comes with a new, vital reality, beside which the story of the yet living men and women of whom I have told you grows vague and incomplete, like an unguessed riddle.  I have no key to solve it with,—­no right to solve it.  Let me lay the pen abruptly down.

* * * * *

My story is coarse, unended, a mere groping hint?  It has no conduit of God’s justice running through it, awarding good and ill?  It lacks determined concord, and a certain yea and nay?  I know:  it is a story of To-Day.  The Old Year is on us yet.  Poor faithful old Knowles will tell you that it is a dark day:  that now, as eighteen hundred years ago, the Helper stands unwelcome in the world:  that the air is filled with the cry of the slave, and of nations going down into darkness, their message untold, their work undone:  that your own heart, as well as the great humanity, asks, even now, an unrendered justice.  Does he utter all the problem of To-Day?  I think, not all:  yet let it be.  Other hands are strong to show you how, in the very instant peril of this hour, is lifted clearer into view the eternal, hopeful prophecy; may tell you that the slumbering heaven and the unquiet earth are instinct with it; that the unanswered prayer of your own life should teach it to you; that in that Book wherein God has not scorned to write the history of America we find the quiet surety that the To-Morrow of the world is near at hand.

For me, I have no prophetic insight, as I said before:  the homely things of every day wear their old faces.  This moment, the evening air thrills with a purple of which no painter has caught the tint, no poet the meaning; not a face passes me in the street on which some human voice has not the charm to call out love or power:  the Helper yet waits amongst us; surely, this Old Year you despise holds beauty, work, content yet unmastered.  Child-souls, you tell me, like that of Lois, may find it enough to hold no past and no future, to accept the work of each moment, and think it no wrong to drink every drop of its beauty and joy:  we who are wiser laugh at them.  It may be:  yet I say unto you, their angels only do always behold the face of my Father in the New Year.

* * * * *

MOUNTAIN PICTURES.

I.

FRANCONIA FROM THE PEMIGEWASSET.

  Once more, O Mountains of the North, unveil
    Your brows, and lay your cloudy mantles by! 
  And once more, ere the eyes that seek ye fail,
    Uplift against the blue walls of the sky
  Your mighty shapes, and let the sunshine weave
    Its golden net-work in your