rrors and sublimities. His
descriptions of morning and evening are always charged with emotion--the
quiet coming-on of night in Eden; or the break of day in the wilderness
of the Temptation, with a sense of joy and relief "after a night of storm
so ruinous." His feeling for the imaginative effects of architecture in a
landscape is extraordinarily subtle. One, at least, of these effects is
hardly to be experienced among the hedgerows and farmsteads and placid
rambling towns of England. Travellers in Italy, or in the East, are
better able to understand the transfiguration of a landscape by the
distant view of a small compact array of walls and towers perched on a
vantage-ground among the hills of the horizon. The lawlessness of Nature,
the homelessness of the surface of the earth, and the fears that haunt
uninhabited places, are all accentuated by the distrust that frowns from
the battlements of such a stronghold of militant civility. For this
reason, perhaps, the architectural features in certain pictures and
drawings have an indescribable power of suggestion. The city,
self-contained and fortified, overlooking a wide expanse of country,
stands for safety and society; the little group of figures, parleying at
the gate, or moving down into the plain, awakens in the mind a sense of
far-off things,--the moving accidents of the great outer world, and the
dangers and chances of the unknown. Bunyan, whose imagination was
nourished on the Eastern scenery and sentiment of the Bible, shows
himself powerfully affected by situations of this kind, as where, in the
beginning of the _Pilgrim's Progress_, he describes the man with his face
from his own home, running from the City of Destruction, and the group of
his kindred calling after him to return:--"but the man put his fingers in
his ears, and ran on crying, Life, Life, Eternal Life: so he looked not
behind him, but fled towards the middle of the plain."

Such another figure is Milton's Abdiel, who escaped from the rebel
citadel--

And with retorted scorn his back he turned
On those proud towers, to swift destruction doomed.

The perils of his flight are vaguely indicated by a few admirable touches
in the opening of the next Book:--

All night the dreadless Angel, unpursued,
Through Heaven's wide champaign held his way, till Morn
Waked by the circling Hours, with rosy hand
Unbarred the gates of Light.

A more signal instance of the same poetic effect is to be fou