To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society.  But if a man would be alone let him look at the stars.  The rays that come from those heavenly bodies will separate between him and what he touches.  One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man in the heavenly bodies the perpetual presence of the sublime.  Seen in the streets of cities, how great they are!  If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how men would believe and adore, and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown!  But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.

Nature never wears a mean appearance.  Neither does the wisest man extort her secret, and lose his curiosity by finding out all her perfection.  When we speak of Nature in this manner we have a distinct but most poetical sense in the mind.  We mean the integrity of impression made by manifold natural objects.  The charming landscape which I saw this morning is indubitably made up of some twenty or thirty farms.  Miller owns this field, Locke that, and Manning the woodland beyond.  But none owns the landscape.  There is a property in the horizon which no man has but he whose eye can integrate all the parts—­that is, the poet.  This is the best part of these men’s farms, yet to this their warranty-deeds give no title.

II.—­HER DELIGHT

In the presence of Nature a wild delight runs through the man in spite of real sorrow.  Not the sun or the summer alone, but every hour and season yields its tribute of delight; for every hour and change corresponds to and authorises a different state of mind, from breathless noon to grimmest midnight.  Crossing a bare common, in snow puddles, at twilight, under a clouded sky, without having in my thoughts any occurrence of special good fortune, I have enjoyed a perfect exhilaration.  I am glad to the brink of fear.  In the woods, too, a man casts off his years as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life is always a child.  Within these plantations of God a decorum and sanctity reign, a perennial festival is dressed, and the guest sees not how he should tire of them in a thousand years.  Standing on the bare ground, my head bathed in the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, all mean egotism vanishes.  I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of universal being circulate through me; I am a part or particle of God.  I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty.

Yet it is certain that the power to produce this delight does not reside in Nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both.  It is necessary to use these pleasures with great temperance.  For Nature is not always tricked in holiday attire, but the same scene which yesterday breathed perfume and glittered as for the frolic of nymphs is overspread with melancholy to-day.  Nature always wears the colours of the spirit.