-the glittering sunny showers, and December snows
--are still the same, or accompanied with the same thoughts and
feelings: there is no object, however trifling or rude, that does not in
some mood or other find its way into the heart, as a link in the chain
of our living being; and this it is that makes good that saying of the
poet--

"To me the meanest flower that blows can give
Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears."

Thus nature is a kind of universal home, and every object it presents to
us an old acquaintance with unaltered looks; for there is that consent
and mutual harmony among all her works, one undivided spirit pervading
them throughout, that to him who has well acquainted himself with them,
they speak always the same well-known language, striking on the heart,
amidst unquiet thoughts and the tumult of the world, like the music of
one's native tongue heard in some far-off country.

"My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began,
So is it now I am a man,
So shall it be when I grow old and die.
The child's the father of the man,
And I would have my years to be
Linked each to each by natural piety."

The daisy that first strikes the child's eye in trying to leap over
his own shadow, is the same flower that with timid upward glance
implores the grown man not to tread upon it. Rousseau, in one of his
botanical excursions, meeting with the periwinkle, fell upon his knees,
crying out--_Ah! voila de la pervenche!_ It was because he had thirty
years before brought home the same flower with him in one of his rambles
with Madame de Warens, near Chambery. It struck him as the same
identical little blue flower that he remembered so well; and thirty
years of sorrow and bitter regret were effaced from his memory. That, or
a thousand other flowers of the same name, were the same to him, to the
heart, and to the eye; but there was but one Madame Warens in the world,
whose image was never absent from his thoughts; with whom flowers and
verdure sprung up beneath his feet, and without whom all was cold and
barren in nature and in his own breast. The cuckoo, "that wandering
voice," that comes and goes with the spring, mocks our ears with one
note from youth to age; and the lapwing, screaming round the traveller's
path, repeats for ever the same sad story of Tereus and Philomel!

LECTURE VI.
ON SWIFT, YOUNG, G