the niggard stubbles; and his countenance literally brightened with genial interest whenever we chanced to encounter some adventurous ant carrying its burden of a millet-seed over the Alpine fissures of a yawning cart-rut. I was bound to respect this man, for I was a boy and ambitious, he was old and renowned. He was kind to me, for he had known one of my family in a former generation, and would suffer me to walk by his side, and encourage me by indulgent, possibly contemptuous silence, to pour forth my crude fancies and my vague aspirations,-He, who could have taught me so much, content to listen; I, who could have taught him nothing, well pleased to talk. And so, one day when he had more than usually provoked my resentment by devoting to gossamers and ants the admiring interest I was urging him to bestow upon bards and heroes, I exclaimed, with abrupt candour-"If ever I win a tenth part of your fame, sir, I don't think I shall run away from it into the country, especially into a country in which one has nothing to look at except ants and gossamers!" The old man stopped short, and, leaning on his stick, first stared at me, and then, musingly, into space. Perhaps my rude speech set him thinking. At last he said, very quietly, and as if more to himself than me, "I shall soon leave the world men and women I may hope again to see elsewhere, but shall I see elsewhere corn-fields and grass, gossamers and ants?" Again he paused a moment or two, and then added, "As we lose hold of our five senses do we wake up a sixth which had before been dormant-the sense of Nature; or have we certain instincts akin to Nature which are suppressed and overlaid by our reason, and revive only at the age when our reason begins to fail us?"

I think I quote his words with accuracy-certainly their sense; for

* Sir H. DAVY's Works, vol. ix. p.

they puzzled me so much at the time that I often thought over them. And many years afterwards they came back to me in full force when reading the very remarkable conjectures upon instinct that are scattered throughout the works of Sir Humphry Davy; in which that most imaginative of all our men of science suggests, in opposition to the various theories founded upon Locke, that man has instincts, of which revelation is one, and "that many of those powers which have been called instinctive belong to the more refined clothing of the spirit."* Be this as it may, I doubt not that each of my readers will recall some instance analogous to that which I have cited, of the charm which nature gradually acquires as our steps near the grave which is the vanishing point of her landscape. Year by year, I find that same charm gaining sway over myself. There was one period of my life when I considered every hour spent out of capitals as time wasted-when, with exhilarated spirits I would return from truant loiterings under summer trees to the smoke and din of London thoroughfares, I loved to hear the ring of my own tread on the hard pavement. The desire to compete and to combat-the thirst for excitements opening one upon the other in the upward march of an opposed career-the study of man in his thickest haunts-the heart's warm share in the passions which the mind, clear from their inebriety, paused to analyse,-these gave to me, as they give to most active men in the unflagging energies of youth, a delight in the vista of gas-lamps and the hubbub of the great mart for the interchange of ideas. But now-I love the country as I did when a little child, before I had admitted into my heart that ambition which is the first fierce lesson we learn at school. Is it, partly, that those trees never remind us that we are growing old? Older

343, The Proteus, or Immortality.

than we are, their hollow stems are covered with rejoicing leaves. The birds build amidst their bowering branches rather than in the lighter shade of the sapling. Nature has no voice that wounds the self-love; her coldest wind nips no credulous affection. She alone has the same face in our age as in our youth. The friend with whom we once took sweet counsel we have left in the crowd, a stranger-perhaps a foe! The woman in whose eyes, some twenty years ago, a paradise seemed to open in the midst of a fallen world, we passed the other day with a frigid bow. She wore rouge and false hair. But those wild flowers under the hedgerow-those sparkles in the happy waters-no friendship has gone from them!-their beauty has no simulated freshness-their smile has no fraudulent deceit.

But there is a deeper truth than all this, in the influence which nature gains over us in proportion as life withdraws itself from struggle and contention. We are placed on earth for a certain period to fulfil, according to our several conditions and degrees of mind, those duties by which the earth's history is carried on. Desk and warehouse, factory and till, forum and senate, schools of science and arts, arms and letters -by these we beautify and enrich our common habitation; by these we defend, bind together, exalt, the destinies of our common race. And during this period the mind is wisely fitted less to contemplate than to act-less to repose than to toil. The great stream of worldly life needs attrition along its banks in order to maintain the law that regulates the movement of its waves. But when that period of action ap

proaches towards its close, the soul, for which is decreed an existence beyond the uses of earth-an existence aloof from desk and warehouse, factory and till, forum and senate, schools of science and art, arms and letters-gradually relaxes its hold of former objects, and, insensibly perhaps to itself, is attracted nearer towards the divine source of all being, in the increasing witchery by which nature, distinct from man, reminds it of its independence of the crowd from which it begins to re-emerge.

And, in connection with this spiritual process, it is noticeable how intuitively in age we turn with strange fondness to all that is fresh in the earliest dawn of youth. If we never cared for little children before, we delight to see them roll in the grass over which we hobble on crutches. The grandsire turns wearily from his middle-aged careworn son to listen with infant-laugh to the prattle of an infant grandchild. It is the old who plant young trees; it is the old who are most saddened by the autumn and feel most delight in the returning spring.

And, in the exquisite delicacy with which hints of the invisible eternal future are conveyed to us, may not that instinctive sympathy, with which life rounds its completing circle towards the point at which it touches the circle of life winding up to meet it, be a subtle intimation that, from such point of contact, youth will spring forth again?—may there be no meaning more profound than the obvious interpretation, in the sacred words, "Make yourselves as little children, for of such is the kingdom of heaven"?

I have noticed, in the previous essay, that increased fondness for rural nature, which is among the ordinary characteristics of advancing age, as increase of stillness is among the ordinary attributes of

deepening eve. But there are persons who, from first to last, are such special lovers of the country life that they never feel thoroughly at home in the stony labyrinth of capitals; and there are others who,

from first to last, would rather look out on a back-yard in St James's than on the vales under Fiesolè in the hues of a Tuscan autumn, or the waters of Windermere in the hush of an English June.

We, who are lovers of the country, are not unnaturally disposed to consider that our preference argues some finer poetry of sentiment some steadier devotion to those ennobling studies which sages commend as the fitting occupations of retirement. But the facts do not justify that self-conceit upon our part. It was said by a philosopher who was charged with all the cares of a world's empire, that "there is no such great matter in retirement. A man may be wise and sedate in a crowd as well as in a desert, and keep the noise of the world from getting within him. In this case, In this case, as Plato observes, the walls of a town and the enclosure of a sheepfold may be made the same thing.' Certainly poets, and true poets, have lived by choice in the dingy streets of great towns. Men of science, engaged in reasonings the most abstruse, on subjects the most elevating, have usually fixed their dwelling-place in bustling capitals, as if the din of the streets without deepened, by the force of contrast, the quiet of those solitary closets, wherein they sat analysing the secret heart of that Nature, whose everyday outward charms they abandoned to commonplace adorers.

On the other hand, men perforce, engaged in urban occupations, nei

ther bards nor sages but city clerks and traders, feel a yearning of the heart towards a home in the country; loving rural nature with so pure a fervour that, if closer intercourse be forbidden, they are contented to go miles every evening to kiss the skirt of her robe. Their first object is to live out of London, if but in a suburb; to refresh their eyes with the green of a field; to greet the first harbinger of spring in the primrose venturing forth in their own tiny realm of garden. It is for them, as a class, that cities extend beyond their ancient bounds; while our nobles yet clung to their gloomy halls in the Flete, traders sought homesteads remote from their stalls and wares in the pleasing village of Charing; gradually nobles were allured by the gentle example, and proud villas, with gardens sloping down to the river-side, chased the woodlark, or rather the bittern, away from the Strand.+

Nothing more stamps the true Cockney than his hate for the sound of Bow bells. It is in vain that we squirearchs affect to sneer at the rural tastes of the cit in his rood of ground by the highroad to Hampstead: the aquarium stored with minnows and tittlebats; the rockwork of vitrified clinkers, rich with ferns borne from Wales and the Highlands. His taste is not without knowledge. He may tell us secrets in horticulture that would startle our Scotch gardener; and if ever he be rich and bold enough to have a farm, the chances are that

ment. His pursuit carried on through the season in which nature has the least beauty for those who, like Horace, regard winter as deformed; he welcomes with quickening pulse the aspects that sadden the lovers of flowers and sunshine. That slushing thaw, that melancholy drizzle, through which I, no follower of Nimrod, gaze listless and dejected from misty windows on skeleton trees and desolated parterres, raise the spirits and gladden the sense of the hunter. He has the privilege of finding beauties in the most sullen expression which the countenance of nature can assume; and he is right, and he is rewarded. How cheerily the tongue of the hounds rings through those dripping covers! With what a burst of life that copse of evergreens comes out from the nude hedgerows at the wind of the hazy lane! How playfully that noisy brook, through which the rider will splash his jocund way, re-escapes in its glee from the ice whose bonds it has broken! And when all is over, and the hunter rides homeward, perhaps alone, the westering sun breaks out from the clouds, just to bid him good-night and disappear; or over his own roof-tops gleams the moon or the wintry star, on which he gazes with a dim, half-conscious

"Devotion to something afar

From the sphere of our sorrow."

He has been that day with Nature, and the exhilaration of his exercise has lifted up his spirits to enjoy her companionship; inwardly, perhaps mechanically, as we enjoy that of any familiar friend, without pausing to expatiate on the charms of friendship.

But here let the hunter speak for himself, and in words that eloquently approve my attempt to analyse his sensations. "It is by the real sportsman-by the true admirer of nature and nature's God -by the man fraught with a lively

sense of the boon of existence, of thankfulness for the health and happiness he is permitted to enjoy

by the man at peace with himself, and in charity with all men, that the exhilarating sensations of a hunting morning will be felt and appreciated." * The piety which pervades this extract is in harmony with the spirit in which the ancients appear to have regarded the pleasures of the chase. Arrian opens his Cynegiticus, or "Treatise on Coursing," by reminding us how carefully "Xenophon has commemorated the advantages that accrue to mankind from hunting, and the regard of the gods for those instructed in it by Chiron." And indeed Xenophon was scrupulously rigid in preserving that mythical alliance between religion and hunting-forbidding the sportsman even to slip a hound until he has vowed a due share of the game to Apollo and Diana. So that even in the heathen times the chase brought man too closely face to face with nature not to suggest to him a recognition of that Celestial Soul which lights the smile upon her lips. Certainly in the chase itself all my sympathies are on the side of the fox; perhaps from a foolish inclination, which has done me little good in the world, towards the weaker party, leading me imprudently to favour those whom there is a strong determination to run down. But if all individuals are to give way to the greatest happiness of the greatest number, we must set off against the painful fate of the fox the pleasurable sensation in the breasts of numbers, which his fate has the honourable privilege to excite, and be contented to sacrifice his personal welfare, as we sacrifice some "vested interest" to that pitiless Moloch "the Public Advantage."

For myself, though no participator in the joys of more vehement sport, I have a pleasure that I cannot reconcile to my abstract notions