being, at times dejected by the trials of a solitary and an almost
abortive life, or sustained or elevated by its prosperous incidents; I
sometimes think that no one other blessing of existence hath ever
comforted my heart and restored my soul so much, as the pleasures and
delights of COLOUR. It is my wealth, my joy, my faculty, my fountain!

The recreative pleasure that others find in Music, although this is not
denied is less to me than to them, a restorative and a balm. Music excites,
arouses me; melts me into weakness, or animates me into passionate
exertion; but it is in the green pasture and beside the still waters, in
bowers apparelled with white and red; it is in the tints with which autumn
is bedecked, and Day expires; that I feel I shall not want, and that GOD
restoreth my soul! And it is among huge and solitary mountain masses of
grey castellated rock, in the crevices of which the stinted pine, and the
cedar with its brown and tattered trunk, struggle out a hard and scanty
existence and are yet covered with never-fading verdure--mountains to
which the Saviour of mankind might have retired to meditate and pray--that
I feel that the Lord is my Shepherd, and shall bring me to the green
pastures, and lead me beside the still waters; my Rock! my fortress! and
my high tower!

Sometimes my heart takes a fancy altogether for _brown_ hues; and as you
cannot at all times command these in the country, I seat myself down
quietly in front of a precious Cuyp with which GOD hath endowed me, and
that (except the sky and water) is composed entirely of them in every
gradation and shade; and when I rise up from the contemplation of it, I
feel that it is in brown hues that GOD restoreth my soul.

Sometimes I dwell upon the silvery trunk of the birch-tree, or upon the
darker hue of the beech. Sometimes my soul drinks the full beauties of the
umbrageous chestnut; or revels in the golden berries, and the graceful
branches that seem overladen with them, of the mountain-ash. As I grow old
I wave often in the grey pendulous mosses of the South, or stand in
thought under the gigantick branches of the live oak, with all its leaves
of laurel, and its heroick gesture. GOOD GOD! I say, when I think that we
might all have been born, ate, drank, smoked, grown up, built, propagated,
and died, as thoroughly and effectually as we now do, and all these
precious objects of our sight and joy been made for us--out of the one
desolate colour of an