as he walks confidingly near our feet. Not till
the dream-circle, of which ourselves are the centre, dissolves or
subsides, do the fairest sights and sweetest sounds in nature lose their
relationship to us the beholder and hearer, and relapse into the common
property of all our kind. To self appertains the whole sensuous as well
as the whole spiritual world. Egoism is the creator of all beauty and
all bliss, of all hope and of all faith. Even thus doth imagination
unify Sabbath worship. All our beloved Scotland is to the devout breast
on that day one House of God. Each congregation--however far
apart--hears but one hymn--sympathy with all is an all-comprehensive
self--and Christian love of our brethren is evolved from the conviction
that we have ourselves a soul to be saved or lost.

Yet, methinks, imagination loveth just as well to pursue an opposite
process, and to furnish food to the heart in separate picture after
separate picture, one and all imbued not with the same but congenial
sentiment, and therefore succeeding one another at her will, be her will
intimated by mild bidding or imperial command. In such mood imagination,
in still series, visions a thousand parish-kirks, each with its own
characteristic localities, Sabbath-sanctified; distributes the beauty of
that hallowed day in allotments all over the happy land--so that in one
Sabbath there are a thousand Sabbaths.

Keep carolling, then, all together, ye countless Larks, till heaven is
one hymn! Imagination thinks she sees each particular field that sends
up its own singer to the sky--the spot of each particular nest. And of
the many hearts all over loveliest Scotland in the sweet vernal season
a-listening your lays, she is with the quiet beatings of the happy, with
the tumult in them that would wish to break! The little maiden by the
well in the brae-side above the cottage, with the Bible on her knees,
left in tendance of an infant--the palsied crone placed safely in the
sunshine till after service--the sickly student meditating in the shade,
and somewhat sadly thinking that these spring flowers are the last his
eyes may see--lovers walking together on the Sabbath before their
marriage to the house of God--life-wearied wanderers without a
home--remorseful men touched by the innocent happiness they cannot help
hearing in heaven--the sceptic--the unbeliever--the atheist to whom
"hope comes not that comes to all." What different meanings to such
different aud