e variety and
picturesque inequality of Nature we owe the great charm of her uncloying
beauty. Look at her primitive woods; scattered trees, with moist sward
and bright mosses at their roots; great clumps of green shadow, where
limb intwists with limb and the rustle of one leaf stirs a hundred
others,--stretching up steep hillsides, flooding with green beauty the
valleys, or arching over with leaves the sharp ravines, every tree and
shrub unlike its neighbor in size and proportion,--the old and storm-
broken leaning on the young and vigorous,--intricate and confused,
without order or method. Who would exchange this for artificial French
gardens, where every tree stands stiff and regular, clipped and trimmed
into unvarying conformity, like so many grenadiers under review? Who
wants eternal sunshine or shadow? Who would fix forever the loveliest
cloudwork of an autumn sunset, or hang over him an everlasting
moonlight? If the stream had no quiet eddying place, could we so admire
its cascade over the rocks? Were there no clouds, could we so hail the
sky shining through them in its still, calm purity? Who shall venture
to ask our kind Mother Nature to remove from our sight any one of her
forms or colors? Who shall decide which is beautiful, or otherwise, in
itself considered?

There are too many, like my fastidious friend, who go through the world
"from Dan to Beersheba, finding all barren,"--who have always some fault
or other to find with Nature and Providence, seeming to consider
themselves especially ill used because the one does not always coincide
with their taste, nor the other with their narrow notions of personal
convenience. In one of his early poems, Coleridge has well expressed a
truth, which is not the less important because it is not generally
admitted. The idea is briefly this: that the mind gives to all things
their coloring, their gloom, or gladness; that the pleasure we derive
from external nature is primarily from ourselves:--

"from the mind itself must issue forth
A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist,
Enveloping the earth."

The real difficulty of these lifelong hunters after the beautiful exists
in their own spirits. They set up certain models of perfection in their
imaginations, and then go about the world in the vain expectation of
finding them actually wrought out according to pattern; very
unreasonably calculating that Nat