dazzlingly green it was! At the distance of about a mile from my hut,
the stream was broken into a slight waterfall, whose sound was heard
distinct and deep in that still place; and often I paused, from my
midnight thoughts, to listen to its enchanted and wild melody. The
fall was unseen by the ordinary wanderer, for, there, the stream passed
through a thick copse; and even when you pierced the grove, and gained
the water-side, dark trees hung over the turbulent wave, and the silver
spray was thrown upward through the leaves, and fell in diamonds upon
the deep green sod.

This was a most favoured haunt with me: the sun glancing through the
idle leaves; the music of the water; the solemn absence of all other
sounds, except the songs of birds, to which the ear grew accustomed,
and, at last, in the abstraction of thought, scarcely distinguished from
the silence; the fragrant herbs; and the unnumbered and nameless
flowers which formed my couch,--were all calculated to make me pursue
uninterruptedly the thread of contemplation which I had, in the less
voluptuous and harsher solitude of the closet, first woven from the web
of austerest thought. I say pursue, for it was too luxurious and
sensual a retirement for the conception of a rigid and severe train of
reflection; at least it would have been so to me. But when the thought
_is once born_, such scenes seem to me the most fit to cradle and to
rear it. The torpor of the physical appears to leave to the mental
frame a full scope and power; the absence of human cares, sounds, and
intrusions, becomes the best nurse to contemplation; and even that
delicious and vague sense of enjoyment which would seem, at first, more
genial to the fancy than the mind, preserves the thought undisturbed
because contented; so that all but the scheming mind becomes lapped
in sleep, and the mind itself lives distinct and active as a dream,--a
dream, not vague nor confused nor unsatisfying, but endowed with more
than the clearness, the precision, the vigour, of waking life.

A little way from this waterfall was a fountain, a remnant of a classic
and golden age. Never did Naiad gaze on a more glassy mirror, or dwell
in a more divine retreat. Through a crevice in an overhanging mound of
the emerald earth, the father stream of the fountain crept out, born,
like Love, among flowers, and in the most sunny smiles; it then fell,
broadening and glowing, into a marble basin, at whose bottom, in the
shining no