eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in
painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced
by the scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple
elements? Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright hollies
round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch, rich with
its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here and there with a
golden bud; the deep soft heather carpet, which invites you to lie down
and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and the
dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft grey
sky.

An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation? Well, I like it,
outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up
my imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the
saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They are my Alps;
little ones, it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what is size?
A phantom of our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if you will
consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size: and to the eye of
the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as
magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when
embodied in the span of some cathedral roof. Have you eyes to see? Then
lie down on the grass, and look near enough to see something more of
what is to be seen; and you will find tropic jungles in every square
foot of turf; mountain cliffs and debacles at the mouth of every rabbit
burrow: dark strids, tremendous cataracts, "deep glooms and sudden
glories," in every foot-broad rill which wanders through the turf. All
is there for you to see, if you will but rid yourself of "that idol of
space;" and Nature, as everyone will tell you who has seen dissected an
insect under the microscope, is as grand and graceful in her smallest as
in her hugest forms.

The March breeze is chilly: but I can be always warm if I like in my
winter-garden. I turn my horse's head to the red wall of fir-stems, and
leap over the furze-grown bank into my cathedral, wherein if there be
no saints, there are likewise no priestcraft and no idols; but endless
vistas of smooth red green-veined shafts holding up the warm dark roof,
lessening away into endless gloom, paved with rich brown fir-needle--a
carpet at which Nature has been at work for forty years. Red shafts,
green roof, and here and there a p