eeze as one would on a quickset
hedge. I shall not soon forget,--having had the good fortune to
meet a vigorous one on an April morning, between Hawes and Settle,
just on the flat under Wharnside,--the vague sense of wonder _with
which I watched Ingleborough stand without rocking_."]

[Footnote C: Compare Wordsworth's

"Oh beauteous birds, methinks ye measure
Your movements to some heavenly tune."

And again--

"While the mists,
Flying and rainy vapors, call out shapes,
And phantoms from the crags and solid earth,
As fast as a musician scatters sounds
Out of an instrument."

And again--

"The Knight had ridden down from Wensley moor,
With the slow motion of a summer cloud."]]

[Footnote 20: 'Blasphemy.'--If the reader can refer to my papers on
Fiction in the 'Nineteenth Century,' he will find this word
carefully defined in its Scriptural, and evermore necessary,
meaning,--'Harmful speaking'--not against God only, but against
man, and against all the good works and purposes of Nature. The
word is accurately opposed to 'Euphemy,' the right or well-speaking
of God and His world; and the two modes of speech are those which
going out of the mouth sanctify or defile the man.

Going out of the mouth, that is to say, deliberately and of
purpose. A French postilion's 'Sacr-r-re'--loud, with the low 'Nom
de Dieu' following between his teeth, is not blasphemy, unless
against his horse;--but Mr. Thackeray's close of his Waterloo
chapter in 'Vanity Fair,' "And all the night long Amelia was
praying for George, who was lying on his face dead with a bullet
through his heart," is blasphemy of the most fatal and subtle kind.

And the universal instinct of blasphemy in the modern vulgar
scientific mind is above all manifested in its love of what is
ugly, and natural inthrallment by the abominable;--so that it is
ten to one if, in the description of a new bird, you learn much
more of it than the enumerated species of vermin that stick to its
feathers; and in the natural history museum of Oxford, humanity has
been hitherto taught, not by portraits of great men, but by the
skulls of cretins.

But the _deliberate_ blasphemy of science, the assertion of its own
virtue and dignity against the always implied, and often asserted,
vileness of all men and--Gods,--heretofore, is the most wonderful
phenomenon, so far as I can read or perceive, that hitherto has
arisen in the