grand outlines which it presents to
him, he can no longer bear anything mean in his way of thinking. Who can
tell how many luminous ideas, how many heroic resolutions, which would
never have been conceived in the dark study of the imprisoned man of
science, nor in the saloons where the people of society elbow each other,
have been inspired on a sudden during a walk, only by the contact and the
generous struggle of the soul with the great spirit of nature? Who knows
if it is not owing to a less frequent intercourse with this sublime
spirit that we must partially attribute the narrowness of mind so common
to the dwellers in towns, always bent under the minutiae which dwarf and
wither their soul, whilst the soul of the nomad remains open and free as
the firmament beneath which he pitches his tent?

But it is not only the unimaginable or the sublime in quantity, it is
also the incomprehensible, that which escapes the understanding and
that which troubles it, which can serve to give us an idea of the
super-sensuous infinity. As soon as this element attains the grandiose
and announces itself to us as the work of nature (for otherwise it is
only despicable), it then aids the soul to represent to itself the ideal,
and imprints upon it a noble development. Who does not love the eloquent
disorder of natural scenery to the insipid regularity of a French garden?
Who does not admire in the plains of Sicily the marvellous combat of
nature with herself--of her creative force and her destructive power?
Who does not prefer to feast his eyes upon the wild streams and
waterfalls of Scotland, upon its misty mountains, upon that romantic
nature from which Ossian drew his inspiration--rather than to grow
enthusiastic in this stiff Holland, before the laborious triumph of
patience over the most stubborn of elements? No one will deny that in
the rich grazing-grounds of Holland, things are not better ordered
for the wants of physical man than upon the perfid crater of Vesuvius,
and that the understanding which likes to comprehend and arrange all
things, does not find its requirements rather in the regularly planted
farm-garden than in the uncultivated beauty of natural scenery. But
man has requirements which go beyond those of natural life and comfort
or well-being; he has another destiny than merely to comprehend the
phenomena which surround him.

In the same manner as for the observant traveller, the strange wildness
of nature is so attract