He started up with all his ideas about him . `` Halloo , driver ! Take a passenger ? '' shouted he . `` Room on top ! '' answered the driver . Up mounted David , and bowled away merrily toward Boston without so much as a parting glance at that fountain of dreamlike vicissitude . He knew not that a phantom of Wealth had thrown a golden hue upon its waters , nor that one of Love had sighed softly to their murmur , nor that one of Death had threatened to crimson them with his blood , all in the brief hour since he lay down to sleep . Sleeping or waking , we hear not the airy footsteps of the strange things that almost happen . Does it not argue a superintending Providence that , while viewless and unexpected events thrust themselves continually athwart our path , there should still be regularity enough in mortal life to render foresight even partially available ? SIGHTS FROM A STEEPLE . So ! I have climbed high , and my reward is small . Here I stand with wearied knees -- earth , indeed , at a dizzy depth below , but heaven far , far beyond me still . Oh that I could soar up into the very zenith , where man never breathed nor eagle ever flew , and where the ethereal azure melts away from the eye and appears only a deepened shade of nothingness ! And yet I shiver at that cold and solitary thought . What clouds are gathering in the golden west with direful intent against the brightness and the warmth of this summer afternoon ? They are ponderous air-ships , black as death and freighted with the tempest , and at intervals their thunder -- the signal-guns of that unearthly squadron -- rolls distant along the deep of heaven . These nearer heaps of fleecy vapor -- methinks I could roll and toss upon them the whole day long -- seem scattered here and there for the repose of tired pilgrims through the sky . Perhaps -- for who can tell ?
-- beautiful spirits are disporting themselves there , and will bless my mortal eye with the brief appearance of their curly locks of golden light and laughing faces fair and faint as the people XXXXX a rosy dream .
against along as below beyond for of since that to