es Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements! Give me health and
a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous. The dawn is my
Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of
faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the
understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and
dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the
afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset. The
western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes
modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much
life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors. What was
it that Nature would say? Was there no meaning in the live repose of
the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not
re-form for me in words? The leafless trees become spires of flame in
the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of
the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble ruined
with frost, contribute something to the mute music.

IDEALISM.

[From the same.]

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding belongs a sort of
instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature. In their view
man and nature are indissolubly joined. Things are ultimates, and they
never look beyond their sphere. The presence of Reason mars this
faith. . . . Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.
Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position,
apprises us of a dualism. We are strangely affected by seeing the
shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an
unusual sky. The least change in our point of view gives the whole
world a pictorial air. A man who seldom rides needs only to get into a
coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show.
The men, the women--talking, running, bartering, fighting--the earnest
mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs are unrealized at
once, or at least wholly detached from all relation to the observer,
and seen as apparent, not substantial, beings. What new thoughts are
suggested by seeing a face of country quite familiar, in the rapid
movement of the railway car! Nay, the most wonted objects (make a very
slight change in the point of vision) please us most. In a camera
obscura the butcher's cart and the figure of one of our own family
amuse us. So a