green delights the grateful earth."

And so forth, not quite germane (it seems to me) to the matter in hand,
but welcome for its own sake.

Best of all are the fables that deal more immediately with the emotions.
There is, for instance, that of "The Two Travellers," which is
profoundly moving in conception, although by no means as well written as
some others. In this, one of the two, fearfully frost-bitten, saves his
life out of the snow at the cost of all that was comely in his body;
just as, long before, the other, who has now quietly resigned himself to
death, had violently freed himself from Love at the cost of all that was
finest and fairest in his character. Very graceful and sweet is the
fable (if so it should be called) in which the author sings the praises
of that "kindly perspective," which lets a wheat-stalk near the eye
cover twenty leagues of distant country, and makes the humble circle
about a man's hearth more to him than all the possibilities of the
external world. The companion fable to this is also excellent. It tells
us of a man who had, all his life through, entertained a passion for
certain blue hills on the far horizon, and had promised himself to
travel thither ere he died, and become familiar with these distant
friends. At last, in some political trouble, he is banished to the very
place of his dreams. He arrives there overnight, and, when he rises and
goes forth in the morning, there sure enough are the blue hills, only
now they have changed places with him, and smile across to him, distant
as ever, from the old home whence he has come. Such a story might have
been very cynically treated; but it is not so done, the whole tone is
kindly and consolatory, and the disenchanted man submissively takes the
lesson, and understands that things far away are to be loved for their
own sake, and that the unattainable is not truly unattainable, when we
can make the beauty of it our own. Indeed, throughout all these two
volumes, though there is much practical scepticism, and much irony on
abstract questions, this kindly and consolatory spirit is never absent.
There is much that is cheerful and, after a sedate, fireside fashion,
hopeful. No one will be discouraged by reading the book; but the ground
of all this hopefulness and cheerfulness remains to the end somewhat
vague. It does not seem to arise from any practical belief in the future
either of the individual or the race, but rather from the profound
perso