thoroughfare and eddy round every
corner--perched up so high upon her rocky throne, she seems to sit
in a freer, finer atmosphere than all the world beside! (I appear,
in my enthusiastic love for Edinburgh, to have forgotten those
Immonderraze, the wynds and closes of the old town.) I hope the
report may not prove true, though from a letter I have received
from my cousin Sally (Siddons) the plague is certainly within six
miles of them. She writes very rationally about it, and I can
scarce forbear superstitiously believing that God's mercy will
especially protect those who are among His most devoted and dutiful
children....

You speak of my love of nature almost as if it were a quality for
which I deserve commendation. It is a blessing for which I am most
grateful. You who live uninclosed by paved streets and brick walls,
who have earth, sea, and sky _a discretion_ spread round you in all
their majestic beauty, cannot imagine how vividly my memory recalls
and my mind dwells upon mere strips of greensward, with the shadows
of trees lying upon them. The colors of a patch of purple heather,
broken banks by roadsides through which sunshine streamed--often
mere effects of light and shade--return to me again and again like
tunes, and _to shut my eyes and look at them_ is a perfect delight
to me. I suppose one is in some way the better as well as the
happier for one's sympathy with the fair things of this fair world,
which are types of things yet fairer, and emanations from the great
Source of all goodness, loveliness, and sublimity. Whether in the
moral or material universe, images and ideas of beauty must always
be in themselves good. Beauty is one manifestation and form of
truth, and the transition seems to me almost inevitable from the
contemplation of things that are lovely to one's _senses_ to those
which are _lovable_ by one's spirits' higher and finer powers of
apprehension. The mind is kept sunny and calm, and free from ill
vapors, by the influence of beautiful things; and surely God loves
beauty, for from the greatest to the smallest it pervades all His
works; and poetry, painting, and sculpture are not as beautiful as
the things they reproduce, because of the imperfect nature-of their
creator--man; though _his_ works are only good in proportion a