o have all interchanged sites and altitudes, and Black Benhun
himself, the Eagle-Breeder, looks so serenely in his rainbow, that you
might almost mistake him for Ben Louey or the Hill of Hinds.

Have you not seen sunsets in which the mountains were imbedded in masses
of clouds all burning and blazing--yes, blazing--with unimaginable
mixtures of all the colours that ever were born--intensifying into a
glory that absolutely became insupportable to the soul as insufferable
to the eyes--and that left the eyes for hours after you had retreated
from the supernatural scene, even when shut, all filled with floating
films of cross-lights, cutting the sky-imagery into gorgeous fragments?
And were not the mountains of such sunsets, whether they were of land or
of cloud, sufficiently vast for your utmost capacities and powers of
delight and joy longing to commune with the Region then felt to be in
very truth Heaven? Nor could the spirit, entranced in admiration,
conceive at that moment any Heaven beyond--while the senses themselves
seemed to have had given them a revelation, that as it was created could
be felt but by an immortal spirit.

It elevates our being to be in the body near the sky--at once on earth
and in heaven. In the body? Yes--we feel at once fettered and free. In
Time we wear our fetters, and heavy though they be, and painfully
riveted on, seldom do we welcome Death coming to strike them off--but
groan at sight of the executioner. In eternity we believe that all is
spiritual--and in that belief, which doubt sometimes shakes but to prove
that its foundation lies rooted far down below all earthquakes,
endurable is the sound of dust to dust. Poets speak of the spirit, while
yet in the flesh, blending, mingling, being absorbed in the great forms
of the outward universe, and they speak as if such absorption were
celestial and divine. But is not this a material creed? Let Imagination
beware how she seeks to glorify the objects of the senses, and having
glorified them, to elevate them into a kindred being with our own,
exalting them that we may claim with them that kindred being, as if we
belonged to them and not they to us, forgetting that they are made to
perish, we to live for ever!

But let us descend the mountain by the side of this torrent. What a
splendid series of translucent pools! We carry "The Excursion" in our
pocket, for the use of our friends; but our own presentation-copy is
here--we have gotten it by heart