om Mr. Coleridge's poems! But besides the prospect which
opened beneath my feet, another also opened to my inward sight, a
heavenly vision, on which were written, in letters large as Hope could
make them, these four words, LIBERTY, GENIUS, LOVE, VIRTUE; which have
since faded into the light of common day, or mock my idle gaze.

"The beautiful is vanished, and returns not."

Still I would return some time or other to this enchanted spot; but I
would return to it alone. What other self could I find to share that
influx of thoughts, of regret, and delight, the fragments of which I
could hardly conjure up to myself, so much have they been broken and
defaced! I could stand on some tall rock, and overlook the precipice of
years that separates me from what I then was. I was at that time going
shortly to visit the poet whom I have above named. Where is he now? Not
only I myself have changed; the world, which was then new to me, has
become old and incorrigible. Yet will I turn to thee in thought, O
sylvan Dee, in joy, in youth and gladness as thou then wert; and thou
shalt always be to me the river of Paradise, where I will drink of the
waters of life freely!

There is hardly any thing that shows the short-sightedness or
capriciousness of the imagination more than travelling does. With change
of place we change our ideas; nay, our opinions and feelings. We can by
an effort indeed transport ourselves to old and long-forgotten scenes,
and then the picture of the mind revives again; but we forget those that
we have just left. It seems that we can think but of one place at a
time. The canvas of the fancy is but of a certain extent, and if we
paint one set of objects upon it, they immediately efface every other.
We cannot enlarge our conceptions, we only shift our point of view. The
landscape bares its bosom to the enraptured eye, we take our fill of it,
and seem as if we could form no other image of beauty or grandeur. We
pass on, and think no more of it: the horizon that shuts it from our
sight, also blots it from our memory like a dream. In travelling through
a wild barren country, I can form no idea of a woody and cultivated one.
It appears to me that all the world must be barren, like what I see of
it. In the country we forget the town, and in town we despise the
country. "Beyond Hyde Park," says Sir Fopling Flutter, "all is a
desert." All that part of the map that we do not see before us is a
blank. The world in our conceit