s as to the mode in
which languages are formed,--whence words are derived, how they become
transformed and worn out. But they come at first fresh from Nature.

"A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual
processes, will find that always a material image, more or less
luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought,
which furnishes the vestment of the thought. Hence good writing and
brilliant discourse are perpetual allegories."

From this he argues that country life is a great advantage to a powerful
mind, inasmuch as it furnishes a greater number of these material
images. They cannot be summoned at will, but they present themselves
when great exigencies call for them.

"The poet, the orator, bred in the woods, whose senses have been
nourished by their fair and appeasing changes, year after year,
without design and without heed,--shall not lose their lesson
altogether, in the roar of cities or the broil of politics. Long
hereafter, amidst agitations and terror in national councils,--in
the hour of revolution,--these solemn images shall reappear in their
morning lustre, as fit symbols and words of the thought which the
passing events shall awaken. At the call of a noble sentiment, again
the woods wave, the pines murmur, the river rolls and shines, and
the cattle low upon the mountains, as he saw and heard them in his
infancy. And with these forms the spells of persuasion, the keys of
power, are put into his hands."

It is doing no wrong to this very eloquent and beautiful passage to say
that it reminds us of certain lines in one of the best known poems of
Wordsworth:--

"These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye;
But oft, in lonely rooms, and mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness sensations sweet
Felt in the blood and felt along the heart."

It is needless to quote the whole passage. The poetry of Wordsworth may
have suggested the prose of Emerson, but the prose loses nothing by the
comparison.

In _Discipline_, which is his next subject, he treats of the influence
of Nature in educating the intellect, the moral sense, and the will.
Man is enlarged and the universe lessened and brought within his grasp,
because

"Time and space relations vanish as laws are known."--"The moral