he
distant hills, as if the sky itself having come down, we could look
through a portion of it, as through a veil. It is not the vague
possibility of what may be shrouded in the blue that stirs our hearts.
We know that if we saw it close it would be set full of villages, and
farmhouses, lanes and orchards, and furrowed fields; no other, and not
fairer than we have near.

Is it what we impart, or impute to nature from ourselves, that we
chiefly lean upon? or does she truly impart of what is really in her to
us?

What delight we find in her action, what sentiment in her rest! What
passion we impute to her changes, what apathy of a satisfying calming
sort to her decline!

If one of us could go to another world, and be all alone in it, perhaps
that world would appear to be washed perfectly clean of all this kind of
beauty, though it might in itself and for itself be far more beautiful
than ours.

Who has not felt delight in the grand movements of a thunder-storm, when
the heavens and earth come together, and have it out, and seem to feel
the better for it afterwards, as if they had cleared off old scores? The
sight of noble wrath, and vehement action, cannot only nerve the
energetic; they can comfort those obliged to be still. There is so
little these may do, but the elements are up and doing; and they are in
some sort theirs.

And who does not like to watch the stately white cloud lying becalmed
over the woods, and waiting in a rapture of rest for a wind to come and
float it on? Yet we might not have cared to see the cloud take her rest,
but for the sweetness of rest to ourselves. The plough turned over on
one side under a hedge, while the ploughman rests at noon, might hint to
us what is the key-note of that chord which makes us think the rest of
the cloud so fair.

If the splendour of some intense passion had never suddenly glorified
the spread-out ether of time in which our spirits float, should we feel
such a strange yearning on looking at a sunset, with its tender
preliminary flush, and then the rapid suffusions of scarlet and growth
of gold? If it is not ourselves that we look at then, it is at one of
the tokens and emblems which claim a likeness with us, a link to hold us
up to the clear space that washes itself so suddenly in an elixir costly
as the golden chances of youth, and the crimson rose of love. With what
a sigh, even youth itself will mark that outpouring of coloured glory!
It whelms the world and