ovocations; and their recollection may be most
vivid of the stately gait of women carrying burthens on their heads; of
tropical effect, with caves and naked rock and sunlight; of the relief
of cypresses; of the troubled, busy-looking groups of sea-pines, that
seem always as if they were being wielded and swept together by a
whirlwind; of the air coming, laden with virginal perfumes, over the
myrtles and the scented underwoods; of the empurpled hills standing
up, solemn and sharp, out of the green-gold air of the east at evening.
There go many elements, without doubt, to the making of one such moment
of intense perception; and it is on the happy agreement of these many
elements, on the harmonious vibration of many nerves, that the whole
delight of the moment must depend.

*****

You should have heard him speak of what he loved; of the tent pitched
beside the talking water; of the stars overhead at night; of the blest
return of morning, the peep of day over the moors, the awaking birds
among the birches; how he abhorred the long winter shut in cities; and
with what delight, at the return of the spring, he once more pitched his
camp in the living out-of-doors.

*****

It was one of the best things I got from my education as an engineer:
of which, however, as a way of life, I wish to speak with sympathy. It
takes a man into the open air; it keeps him hanging about harbour-sides,
which is the richest form of idling; it carries him to wild islands; it
gives him a taste of the genial dangers of the sea; it supplies him with
dexterities to exercise; it makes demands upon his ingenuity; it will go
far to cure him of any taste (if ever he had one) for the miserable life
of cities. And when it has done so, it carries him back and shuts him
in an office! From the roaring skerry and the wet thwart of the tossing
boat, he passes to the stool and desk; and with a memory full of ships,
and seas, and perilous headlands, and the shining Pharos, he must apply
his long-sighted eyes to the pretty niceties of drawing, or measure his
inaccurate mind with several pages of consecutive figures. He is a wise
youth, to be sure, who can balance one part of genuine life against
two parts of drudgery between four walls, and for the sake of the one,
manfully accept the other.

*****

No one knows the stars who has not slept, as the French happily put
it, A LA BELLE ETOILE. He may know all their names and distances and
magnitudes, and yet be ig