It was a tidal river, with many changes.
Now it flowed with a full, calm current, conquering the tide, like life sweeping death with it down into the bosom of the eternal.

Now it seemed to stand still, as if aghast at the inroad of the awful thing; and then the minister would bethink himself that it was the tide of the eternal rising in the narrow earthly channel: men, he said to himself, called it _death_, because they did not know what it was, or the loveliness of its quickening energy.

It fails on their sense by the might of its grand excess, and they call it by the name of its opposite.

A weary and rather disappointed pilgrim, he thus comforted himself as he sat.
There a great salmon rose and fell, gleaming like a bolt of silver in the sun! There a little waterbeetle scurried along after some invisible prey.

The blue smoke of his pipe melted in the Sabbath air.