and
streams, and hills have their own vitality.

"The mountains _look_ on Marathon,
And Marathon _looks_ on the sea."

You go to visit them; they meet you half-way: "spectatum veniunt."

Amid the Alps--with glacier, torrent, forest around--you still evoke
the fancied spirit of the scene, though it be but

"To gaze upon her beauty--nothing more."

And where, in sublimer grandeur, snowclad, upreared against the nearer
sun, are seen the towering Andes; to the poet's eye, the Cordillera lies
no huge backbone of earth; but lives, a Rhoetus or Enceladus of the
West, and

"over earth, air, wave,
Glares with his Titan eye."

This is but the calm, the dignified, the measured march of poetical
conception. No wonder, when superstition steps in to prick on
imagination, that all should vividly team with spirit life. Or that on
Walpurgis' night, bush and streamlet and hill bustle and hurry, with
unequal pace, towards the haunted Brocken: the heavy ones lag, indeed, a
little, and are out of breath--

"The giant-snouted crags, ho! ho!
How they snort and how they blow!"

No wonder that to the dreamer's eye, in tranquil scenes of sylvan
solitude the fawn of yore skipped in the forest dell, the dryad peeped
from behind the shadowy oak, the fay tripped lightly over the moonlit
sward.

But enough, and too much, of "your philosophy." Yet there are those
still who may be the wiser for it. Let me sketch you a believer in the
creed it would dispel.

He was a Spanish West-Indian--in his active years had been an extensive
planter and slave-owner in Porto Rico. His manners were grave and
dignified, as due to himself; courteous, as not denying equal or
superior worth in others. He had seen the world, and spoke of it
habitually with a fine irony. We had many a walk together. He was
nervous about his health. One day, as our path lay along the banks of
the Rhine, his conversation took this turn:--

"Do you believe in spirits?" he asked me; and upon my intimating the
polite but qualified assent which suited the tone in which the question
was put--"It may be superstition," he continued, "but I am often
inclined to think that the pucks and goblins, which, as they say, once
haunted these scenes, are not entirely visionary beings. You may
smile--but this has happened, nay, often, happens, to me in my walks. I
see a big clod before me in the path, and form the intention of avoiding
it; when close to it,