inctness of
the past to some at present dimly descried creed of the future. Such
periods of transition are of necessity full of discomfort, doubt, and
anxiety, vague, variable, and unsatisfying. The men in whose spirits
the fermentation of the change is felt, who have abandoned their
old moorings, and have not yet reached the haven for which they are
steering, cannot but be indistinct and undecided in their faith. The
universe of which they form a part becomes important to them in its
infinite immensity. The principles of beauty, goodness, order and law,
no longer connected in their minds with definite articles of faith,
find symbols in the outer world. They are glad to fly at certain
moments from mankind and its oppressive problems, for which religion
no longer provides a satisfactory solution, to Nature, where they
vaguely localise the spirit that broods over us controlling all our
being. To such men Goethe's hymn is a form of faith, and born of such
a mood are the following far humbler verses:--

At Muerren let the morning lead thee out
To walk upon the cold and cloven hills,
To hear the congregated mountains shout
Their paean of a thousand foaming rills.
Raimented with intolerable light
The snow-peaks stand above thee, row on row
Arising, each a seraph in his might;
An organ each of varied stop doth blow.
Heaven's azure dome trembles through all her spheres,
Feeling that music vibrate; and the sun
Raises his tenor as he upward steers,
And all the glory-coated mists that run
Below him in the valley, hear his voice,
And cry unto the dewy fields, Rejoice!

There is a profound sympathy between music and fine scenery: they both
affect us in the same way, stirring strong but undefined emotions,
which express themselves in 'idle tears,' or evoking thoughts 'which
lie,' as Wordsworth says, 'too deep for tears,' beyond the reach
of any words. How little we know what multitudes of mingling
reminiscences, held in solution by the mind, and colouring its fancy
with the iridescence of variable hues, go to make up the sentiments
which music or which mountains stir! It is the very vagueness,
changefulness, and dreamlike indistinctness of these feelings which
cause their charm; they harmonise with the haziness of our beliefs and
seem to make our very doubts melodious. For this reason it is obvious
that unrestrained indulgence in the pleasures of music or of scenery
may tend to destroy habits of cle