such people must be impressed by objects so far beyond the range of
daily experience, of objects, whose wondrous meaning speaks to hearts
the most cloyed and jaded, "as never man spoke." I can luxuriate in
fancying how long-forgotten feelings, old memories of the past, long
buried beneath the load of daily cares, come back fresh and bright under
the influence of associations that recall parer, happier hours. I can
dwell in imagination on the sudden spring made from the stern ordinances
of a world of forms and conventionalities, to that more beautiful and
grander world, whose incense is the odour of wild flowers and whose
music is the falling cataract.

I love to speculate how the statesman, the wily man of forecasting
thought and deep devices, must feel in presence of agencies which make
those of mere man's contrivance seem poor and contemptible; and how the
fine lady, whose foot knows no harder surface than a velvet carpet, and
whose artificial existence palls by its own voluptuousness, contemplates
a picture of grand and stern sublimity. Disguise it how they will, feign
indifference how they may, such scenes always are felt, and deeply felt!
The most accomplished lounger of St. James's Street does not puff his
cigar so coolly as he affects to do, nor is that heart all unmoved that
throbs beneath the graceful folds of a rich Cashmere. Now and then some
Brummagem spirit intrudes, who sees in the felling torrent but a wasted
"water-power:" but even he has his own far-reaching thoughts imbued with
a poetry of their own. He sees in these solitudes new cities arise, the
busy haunts of acting heads and hands; he hears in imagination the heavy
bang of the iron hammer, the roar of the furnace, the rush of steam, the
many-voiced multitude called by active labour to new activity of mind;
and perhaps he soars away, in thought, to those far-off wilds of the
new world, whose people, clothed by these looms, are brought thus into
brotherhood with their kindred men.

I, myself, have few sympathies in common with these; but I respect the
feelings that I do not fathom. "_Nihil humani a me alienum puto_."

What has suggested these thoughts? A little excursion that I made this
evening from the village of Lichtenthal towards the Waterfall, a winding
glen, narrowing as you advance; wilder too, but not less peopled; every
sheltered spot having its own dwelling-place--the picturesque _chalet_,
with its far-stretching eave, and its quaint ga