he subject," said my companion,
"than all the philosophers who ever wrote. Beauty, in a tame unvaried
flat, where a man would know his country only by the milestones! A very
Dutch Paradise, truly!"

"But would not some of your companions above," I asked, "deem the scene
as much an error of nature as Burnet himself? They could pass over these
stubborn rocks neither plough nor harrow."

"True," he replied; "there is a species of small wisdom in the world
that often constitutes the extremest of its folly; a wisdom that would
change the entire nature of _good_, had it but the power, by vainly
endeavouring to render that good universal. It would convert the entire
earth into one vast corn field, and then find that it had ruined the
species by its improvement."

"We of Scotland can hardly be ruined in that way for an age to come," I
said. "But I am not sure that I understand you. Alter the very nature of
good in the attempt to render it universal! How?"

"I daresay you have seen a graduated scale," said my companion,
"exhibiting the various powers of the different musical instruments, and
observed how some of limited scope cross only a few of the divisions,
and how others stretch nearly from side to side. 'Tis but a poor truism,
perhaps, to say that similar differences in scope and power obtain
among men--that there are minds who could not join in the concert of
to-night--who could see neither beauty nor grandeur amid these wild
cliffs and caverns, or in that glorious expanse of sea and sky; and
that, on the other hand, there are minds so finely modulated--minds that
sweep so broadly across the scale of nature, that there is no object,
however minute, no breath of feeling, however faint, but that it awakens
their sweet vibrations--the snow-flake falling in the stream, the daisy
of the field, the conies of the rock, the hysop of the wall. Now, the
vast and various frame of nature is adapted not to the lesser, but to
the larger mind. It spreads on and around us in all its rich and
magnificent variety, and finds the full portraiture of its Proteus-like
beauty in the mirror of genius alone. Evident, however, as this may
seem, we find a sort of levelling principle in the inferior order
of minds, and which, in fact, constitutes one of their grand
characteristics--a principle that would fain abridge the scale to their
own narrow capabilities--that would cut down the vastness of nature to
suit the littleness of their own concepti