glad birds sing,
Than a cool summer dawn, than sunset skies;

Than love, gleaming through Beauty's deep blue eyes,
Than laughing child, than orchards blossoming;
Than girls whose voices make the woodland ring,
Than ruby lips that utter sweet replies,--

Fairer than these, than all that may be seen,
Is the poetic mind, which sheds the light
Of heaven on earthly things, as Night's young Queen
Forth-looking from some jagged mountain height
Clothes the whole earth with her soft silvery sheen
And makes the beauty whereof eyes have sight.

Nature is neither sad nor joyful. We but see in her the reflection of
our own minds. Gay scenes depress the melancholy, and gloomy prospects
have not the power to rob the happy of their contentment. The spring may
fill us with fresh and fragrant thoughts, or may but remind us of all
the hopes and joys we have lost; and autumn will speak to one of decay
and death, to another of sleep and rest, after toil, to prepare for a
new and brighter awakening. All the glory of dawn and sunset is but
etheric waves thrilling the vapory air and impinging on the optic nerve;
but behind it all is the magician who sees and knows, who thinks and
loves. "It is the mind that makes the body rich." Thoughts take shape
and coloring from souls through which they pass; and a free and open
mind looks upon the world in the mood in which a fair woman beholds
herself in a mirror. The world is his as much as the face is hers. If we
could live in the fairest spot of earth, and in the company of those who
are dear, the source of our happiness would still be our own thought and
love; and if they are great and noble, we cannot be miserable however
meanly surrounded. What is reality but a state of soul, finite in man,
infinite in God? Theory underlies fact, and to the divine mind all
things are godlike and beautiful. The chemical elements are as sweet and
pure in the buried corpse as in the blooming body of youth; and it is
defective intellect, the warp of ignorance and sin, which hides from
human eyes the perfect beauty of the world.

"Earth's crammed with heaven,
And every common bush afire with God;
But only he who sees, takes off his shoes."

What we all need is not so much greater knowledge, as a luminous and
symmetrical mind which, whatsoever way it turn, shall reflect the things
that are, not in isolation and abstraction, but in the living uni