He that takes deep in his soft credulity, &c., i.e., he that credulously takes in the impression which demagogues, who claim to speak on behalf of liberty, intend that he should take.

Delude.  A violent torrent, displacing earth in its course.

Strid.  A yawning chasm between rocks.

The Battle of Culloden (1746) closed the Jacobite rebellion of 1745 by the defeat of the Highlanders, and with it the last hopes of the Stuart cause.  The Duke of Cumberland was the leader of the Hanoverian army.]

* * * * *

MY WINTER GARDEN.

No one is less inclined to depreciate that magnificent winter-garden at the Crystal Palace:  yet let me, if I choose, prefer my own; I argue that, in the first place, it is far larger.  You may drive, I hear, through the grand one at Chatsworth for a quarter of a mile.  You may ride through mine for fifteen miles on end.  I prefer, too, to any glass roof which Sir Joseph Paxton ever planned, that dome above my head some three miles high, of soft dappled grey and yellow cloud, through the vast lattice-work whereof the blue sky peeps, and sheds down tender gleams on yellow bogs, and softly rounded heather knolls, and pale chalk ranges gleaming far away.  But, above all, I glory in my evergreens.  What winter-garden can compare for them with mine?  True, I have but four kinds—­Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheets of yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose purple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fragrant green ones which she puts on in spring.  Well:  in painting as in music, what effects are more grand than those produced by the scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple elements?  Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright hollies round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch, rich with its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here and there with a golden bud; the deep soft heather carpet, which invites you to lie down and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall of red fir-stems, and the dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long, against the soft grey sky.

An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation?  Well, I like it, outside and inside.  I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up my imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset.  They are my Alps; little ones, it may be:  but after all, as I asked before, what is size?  A phantom of our brain; an optical delusion.  Grandeur, if you will consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size:  and to the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some