l noise and murkiness, walking in
the peace and spaciousness of unsullied air.

To a mind now happily reverted to the primitive confidence in souls
everywhere indwelling and creating sympathies between all things, the
bonds of kinship between man and nature were drawn ever closer, and it
seemed a wholly natural belief that the changes of the visible universe,
affecting things which lived an almost personal existence, should be
instinct with the deeper meaning of events in the drama of human
existence.

Like the every-day life of men with its imperceptible attritions was the
insensible growth and decay of things; as the tumult of his emotions
were the storms and catastrophes that convulse the face of nature. The
movement never ceased; the transforming power was never wearied; the
spectator had but to give rapt attention, to be carried beyond his poor
solicitudes to a participation in elemental processes of change in which
the fates of humanity were mysteriously involved. The thought of this
indissoluble union kept alive the sense of brotherhood within me, of
responsibility in life, of interest in all that happens; and whether it
was the daily contraction of a pond in drought, or a battle of ants by
the wayside, or the first tinge of autumn upon the woods, all was
ennobled by symbolic relationships to man's experience, which in the
unceasing flow of their perception were lustral to a solitary heart,
without them choked and stagnant.

There was a certain heath-clad ridge which like a watch-tower set above
a city never failed to bring before the ranging eye some vision
pregnant of those emotions by which the sense of humanity is quickened
to a deeper consciousness of itself. The witchery of space was there
always, and seemed to draw from the soul the clinging mists of her
indifference. It was there that I saw nature in all her moods, and felt
that to each my own moods responded; there that despondency, imagining
her monotony of woe, was confuted by the saving changefulness of created
things. I remember one day, when a summer storm was spending its fury, I
stood upon this ridge and looked across the low lands that stretched
away beneath me. They lay with all their boundaries confused by a pall
of purple gloom, then darkly transparent, and dissolving before the
returning sun, whose penetrative influence was felt rather than actually
perceived. As I gazed, high in the veil of cloud there began faintly to
gleam a spot of pal