ange arise of crimson clouds in altitude sublime, and
breast above breast expands of yellow woods softly glittering in their
far-spread magnificence--then what holy bliss to breathe deeper and
deeper unto Him who holds in the hollow of his hand the heavens and the
earth, our high but most humble orisons! But now it is Day, and broad
awake seems the whole joyful world. The clouds--lustrous no more--are
all anchored on the sky, white as fleets waiting for the wind. Time is
not felt--and one might dream that the Day was to endure for ever. Yet
the great river rolls on in the light--and why will he leave those
lovely inland woods for the naked shores? Why--responds some
voice--hurry we on our own lives--impetuous and passionate far more than
he with all his cataracts--as if anxious to forsake the regions of the
upper day for the dim place from which we yet recoil in fear--the dim
place which imagination sometimes seems to see even through the
sunshine, beyond the bourne of this our unintelligible being, stretching
sea-like into a still more mysterious night! Long as a Midsummer Day is,
it has gone by like a Heron's flight. The sun is setting!--and let him
set without being scribbled upon by Christopher North. We took a
pen-and-ink sketch of him in a "Day on Windermere." Poor nature is much
to be pitied among painters and poets. They are perpetually falling into

"Such perusal of her face
As they would draw it."

And often must she be sick of the Curious Impertinents. But a Curious
Impertinent are not we--if ever there was one beneath the skies, a
devout worshipper of Nature; and though we often seem to heed not her
shrine--it stands in our imagination, like a temple in a perpetual
Sabbath.

It was poetically and piously said by the Ettrick Shepherd, at a Noctes,
that there is no such thing in nature as bad weather. Take Summer, which
early in our soliloquy we abused in good set terms. Its weather was
broken, but not bad; and much various beauty and sublimity is involved
in the epithet "broken," when applied to the "season of the year."
Commonplace people, especially town-dwellers, who _flit_ into the
country for a few months, have a silly and absurd idea of Summer, which
all the atmospherical phenomena fail to drive out of their foolish
fancies. They insist on its remaining with us for half a year at least,
and on its being dressed in its Sunday's best every day in the week as
long as they continue in country qua