s of towers and temples serenely
ascending into the skies, high and holy places for rule, for rest, or
for religion, where as kings we may reign, as priests minister, as
saints adore.

We do not deny, excellent youth, that to your eyes and ears beautiful
and sublime are the sights and sounds of Nature--and of Art her Angel.
Enjoy thy pupilage, as we enjoyed ours, and deliver thyself up withouten
dread, or with a holy dread, to the gloom of woods, where night for ever
dwells--to the glory of skies, where morn seems enthroned for ever.
Coming and going a thousand and a thousand times, yet, in its familiar
beauty, ever new as a dream--let thy soul span the heavens with the
rainbow. Ask thy heart in the wilderness if that "thunder, heard
remote," be from cloud or cataract; and ere it can reply, it may shudder
at the shuddering moor, and your flesh creep upon your bones, as the
heather seems to creep on the bent, with the awe of a passing
earthquake. Let the sea-mew be thy guide up the glen, if thy delight be
in peace profounder than ever sat with her on the lull of summer waves!
For the inland loch seems but a vale overflowing with wondrous
light--and realities they all look, these trees and pastures, and rocks
and hills, and clouds--not softened images, as they are, of realities
that are almost stern even in their beauty, and in their sublimity
over-awing; look at yon precipice that dwindles into pebbles the granite
blocks that choke up the shore!

Now all this, and a million times more than all this, have we too done
in our Youth, and yet 'tis all nothing to what we do whenever we will it
in our Age. For almost all _that_ is passion; spiritual passion
indeed--and as all emotions are akin, they all work with, and into one
another's hands, and, however remotely related, recognise and welcome
one another, like Highland cousins, whenever they meet. Imagination is
not the Faculty to stand aloof from the rest, but gives the one hand to
Fancy and the other to Feeling, and _sets_ to Passion, who is often so
swallowed up in himself as to seem blind to their _vis-a-vis_, till all
at once he hugs all the Three, as if he were demented, and as suddenly
sporting _dos-a-dos_--is off on a gallopade by himself right slick away
over the mountain-tops.

To the senses of a schoolboy a green sour crab is as a golden pippin,
more delicious than any pine-apple--the tree which he climbs to pluck it
seems to grow in the garden of Eden--and the