hich discredits our heroes.
Here we find Nature to be the circumstance which dwarfs every other
circumstance, and judges like a god all men that come to her. We have
crept out of our close and crowded houses into the night and morning,
and we see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How
willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively
impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer
nature to intrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a
perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported
spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and
oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees
begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn
trifles. Here no history, or church, or state, is interpolated on the
divine sky and the immortal year. How easily we might walk onward into
the opening landscape, absorbed by new pictures and by thoughts fast
succeeding each other, until by degrees the recollection of home was
crowded out of the mind, all memory obliterated by the tyranny of the
present, and we were led in triumph by nature.

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are
plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make
friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would
persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its
old home: as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our
eyes and hands and feet. It is firm water; it is cold flame; what
health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and
brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest
face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our
nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily
and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope,
just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural
influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest
and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the
bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled
traveller rushes for safety,--and there is the sublime moral of autumn
and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from
her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies,
which call us