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 of a rosy dream . Or where the floating mass so imperfectly obstructs the color of the firmament a slender foot and fairy limb resting too heavily upon the frail support may be thrust through and suddenly withdrawn , while longing fancy follows them in vain . Yonder , again , is an airy archipelago where the sunbeams love to linger in their journeyings through space . Every one of those little clouds has been dipped and steeped in radiance which the slightest pressure might disengage in silvery profusion like water wrung from a sea-maid 's hair . Bright they are as a young man 's visions , and , like them , would be realized in dullness , obscurity and tears . I will look on them no more . In three parts of the visible circle whose centre is this spire I discern cultivated fields , villages , white country-seats , the waving lines of rivulets , little placid lakes , and here and there a rising ground that would fain be termed a hill . On the fourth side is the sea , stretching away toward a viewless boundary , blue and calm except where the passing anger of a shadow flits across its surface and is gone . Hitherward a broad inlet penetrates far into the land ; on the verge of the harbor formed by its extremity is a town , and over it am I , a watchman , all-heeding and unheeded .
Oh that the multitude of chimneys could speak , like those of Madrid , and betray in smoky whispers the secrets of all who since their first foundation have assembled XXXXX the hearths within !
In along as at for into on through to upon