thine with a mixture of pity and laughter, yet also with wonder and veneration. Thou complainest not, my illustrious friend; and yet I believe the heart of thee is full of sorrow, of unspoken sadness, seriousness,-profound melancholy (as some have said) the basis of thy being. Unconsciously, for thou speakest of nothing, this great universe is great to thee. Not by levity of floating, but by stubborn force of swimming, shalt thou make thy way. The Fates sing of thee that thou shalt many times be thought an ass and a dull ox, and shalt with a god-like indifference believe it. My friend-and it is all untrue, nothing ever falser in point of fact! Thou art of those great ones whose greatness the small passer-by does not discern. Thy very stupidity is wiser than their wisdom. A grand vis inertia is in thee; how many grand qualities unknown to small men! Nature alone knows thee, acknowledges the bulk and strength of thee: thy epic, unsung in words, is written in huge characters on the face of this planet, sea-moles, cotton-trades, railways, fleets and cities, Indian empires, Americas, New-Hollands, legible throughout the solar system.

2. A WELSH LANDSCAPE.

(FROM "THE LIFE OF JOHN STERLING," PUBLISHED IN 1851.)

LLANBLETHIAN hangs pleasantly, with its white cottages, and orchard and other trees, on the western slope of a green hill; looking far and wide over green meadows and little or bigger hills, in the pleasant plain of Glamorgan; a short mile to the south of Cow Bridge, to which smart little town it is properly a kind of suburb. Plain of Glamorgan, some ten miles wide and thirty or forty long, which they call the Vale of Glamorgan; though properly it is not quite a vale, there being only one range of mountains to it, if even one: certainly the central mountains of Wales do gradually rise, in a miscellaneous manner, on the north side of it; but on the south are no mountains, not even land, only the Bristol Channel, and far off, the hills of Devonshire, for boundary-the "English Hills," as the natives call them, visible from every eminence in those parts. On such wide terms is it called Vale of Glamorgan. But called by whatever name, it is a most pleasant, fruitful region: kind to the native, interesting to the visitor. A waving grassy region; cut with innumerable ragged lanes; dotted with sheep, unswept human hamlets, old ruinous castles with their ivy and their daws, grey sleepy churches with their ditto, ditto, for ivy every

1

where abounds; and generally a rank fragrant vegetation clothes all things; hanging in rude many-coloured festoons and fringed odoriferous tapestries, on your right and on your left, in every lane. A country kinder to the sluggard husbandman than any I have ever seen. For it lies all on limestone, needs no draining; the soil everywhere of handsome depth and finest quality, will grow good crops for you with the most imperfect tilling. At a safe distance of a day's riding lie the tartarean copper forges of Swansea, the tartarean iron forges of Merthyr; their sooty battle far away, and not, at such safe distance, a defilement to the face of the earth and sky, but rather an encouragement to the earth at least; encouraging the husbandman to plough better if he only would. The peasantry seem indolent and stagnant, but peaceable and well provided; much given to Methodism when they have any character; for the rest an innocent good-humoured people, who all drink home-brewed beer, and have brown loaves of the most excellent home-baked bread. The native peasant village is not generally beautiful, though it might be, were it swept and trimmed; it gives one rather the idea of sluttish stagnancy;-an interesting peep into the Welsh Paradise of Sleepy Hollow. Stones, old kettles, naves of wheels, all kinds of broken litter, with live pigs and etceteras, lie about the street; for as a rule, no rubbish is removed, but waits patiently the action of mere natural chemistry and accident; if even a house is burnt or falls, you will find it there after half a century, only cloaked by the ever ready ivy. Sluggish man seems never to have struck a pick into it; his new hut is built close by on ground not encumbered, and the old stones are still left lying.

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This is the ordinary Welsh village; but there are exceptions, where people of more cultivated tastes have been led to settle; and Llanblethian is one of the more signal of these. decidedly cheerful group of human homes, the greater part of them indeed belonging to persons of refined habits; trimness, shady-shelter, whitewash, neither conveniency nor decoration has been neglected here. Its effect from the distance on the eastward is very pretty you see it like a little sleeping cataract of white houses, with trees overshadowing and fringing it; and there the cataract hangs, and does not rush away from you.

(1) Handsome, in the old sense of convenient.

JULIUS CHARLES HARE.'

1. THE RESTORATIVE INFLUENCE OF NATURAL

SCENERY.

(FROM "GUESSES AT TRUTH," PUBLISHED IN 1848.)

FEW things more vividly teach us the difference between the living objects of nature and the works of man's contrivance, than the impressions produced, when, after a lapse of years, we for the first time revisit the home of our childhood. On entering the old house, how strangely changed does everything appear! We look in vain for much that our fancy, unchecked by the knowledge of any other world than that immediately around, had pictured to itself; and we turn away in half incredulous disappointment, as we pass from room to room, and our memory calls up the various events connected with them. It almost seems to us as though, while our minds have been expanding at a distance, the familiar chambers and halls must have been growing narrower, and are threatening, like the prison-tomb in eastern story, to close upon all the joys of our childhood, and to crush them for ever.

But, when we quit the house of man's building, and seek for fellowship with the past among the living, boundless realities of nature, all that we have lost is regained; and we find how faithful a guardian angel she has been, and how richly she restores us a hundredfold the treasures we had committed to her keeping. The waters of the peaceful river, winding through the groves where the child delighted to wander, speak to us in the same voice now, in which they spoke then; and while we listen to them, the confiding lilies, upborne no less lovingly on their bosom than when in early days we vainly tried to tear them from it, are an emblem of the happy thoughts which we had cast upon them, and which they have preserved for us until we come to reclaim them. The bright kingfisher darting into the river recalls our earliest visions of beauty; and the chorus of birds in the groves seems not only to welcome us back, but also to re-awaken the pure melodies of childhood in its holiest aspirations. In like manner, as we walk under the

(1) The writer of this passage was joint-author, with his brother, of "Guesses at Truth," a work distinguished by the exhibition of graceful, and often profound thoughts in a style at once attractive and critically correct.

deep shade of the stately avenues, the whisperings among the branches seem to flow from the spirits of the place, giving back their portion of the record of our childish years; and we are reminded of the awe with which that shade impressed us, and of the first time we felt anything like fear, when, on a dark evening, the sudden cry of the screech-owl taught us that those trees had other inhabitants, besides the birds to which we listened with such delight by day.

Thus the whole of nature appears to us full of living echoes, to which we uttered our hopes and joys in childhood, though the sound of her response only now for the first time reaches our ears. Everywhere we, as it were, receive back the tokens of a former love, which we had too long forgotten, but which has continued faithful to us. Hence we shall return to our work in the world with a wiser and a truer heart, having learnt that this life is, indeed, the seed-time for eternity, and that in all our acts, from the simplest to the highest, we are sowing what, though it may appear for a time to die, only dies to be quickened and to bear fruit.

JOHN RUSKIN.'

1. REFLEX ACTION OF ART ON MAN'S CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE.

(FROM "THE SEVEN LAMPS OF ARCHITECTURE," PUBLISHED IN 1849.)

IN the edifices of man there should be found reverent worship, and following, not only of the spirit which rounds the pillars of the forest, and arches the vault of the avenue,—which gives veining to the leaf, and polish to the shell, and grace to every pulse that agitates animal organisation, but of that also which reproves the pillars of the earth,2 and builds up her barren

(1) Ruskin has written much that the world will not willingly let die, and in a style strikingly original. The above specimens sufficiently prove this; but should only be regarded as an invitation to the feast of delight prepared for all thoughtful readers in his works. His style is distinguished for breadth of treatment and frequent splendour of colour. If he is not reckoned in after times the finest writer on art that England has ever produced, the fault will be his own. It will be because-not England-but himself does not sufficiently protect and maintain his great reputation.

(2) That also which reproves, &c. This expression cannot be commended for clearness and precision. It seems to mean-men's edifices should embody some

precipices into the coldness of the clouds, and lifts her shadowy cones of mountain purple into the pale arch of the sky; for these, and other glories more than these, refuse not to connect themselves, in his thoughts, with the work of his own hand; the grey cliff loses not its nobleness when it reminds us of some cyclopean waste of mural stone; the pinnacles of the rocky promontory arrange themselves, undegraded, into fantastic semblances of fortress towers; and even the awful cone of the far-off mountain has a melancholy mixed with that of its own solitude, which is cast from the images of nameless tumuli on white sea-shores, and of the heaps of reedy clay, into which chambered cities melt in their mortality.1

2. ASPECT OF NORTHERN AND SOUTHERN
COUNTRIES RESPECTIVELY.

(FROM "STONES OF VENICE," PUBLISHED IN 1851.)

THE charts of the world which have been drawn up by modern science have thrown into a narrow space the expression of a vast amount of knowledge, but I have never yet seen any one pictorial enough to enable the spectator to imagine the kind of contrast in physical character which exists between northern and southern countries. We know the differences in detail, but we have not that broad glance and grasp which would enable us to feel them in their fulness. We know that gentians grow on the Alps, and olives on the Apennines; but we do not enough conceive for ourselves that variegated mosaic of the world's surface which a bird sees in its migration, that difference between the district of the gentian and the olive which the stork and the swallow see far off, as they lean upon the sirocco wind. Let us for a moment try to raise ourselves even above the level of their flight, and imagine the Mediterranean lying beneath us like an irregular lake, and all its ancient promontories sleeping in the sun: here and there an angry spot of thunder, a grey stain of storm, moving upon the burning field; and here and there a fixed wreath of white volcano smoke, surrounded by its circle of ashes; but for the most part a great peacefulness of light, Syria and Greece, Italy and Spain, laid thing of the vastness as well as the beauty of nature; though that vastness reproves all human reality-that is if the "pillars of the earth" means architectural columns. If it does not, then the meaning of "reproves " is still to seek.

(1) See some striking remarks on the aesthetic beauty of this passage in the "Fortnightly Review," ii. 698, by the editor, G. H. Lewes.