The greatest delight which the fields and woods minister is the suggestion of an occult relation between man and the vegetable.  I am not alone and unacknowledged.  They nod to me, and I to them.  The waving of the boughs in the storm is new to me and old.  It takes me by surprise, and yet is not unknown. . . .

I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from daybreak to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share.  The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light.  From the earth, as a shore, I look out into that silent sea.  I seem to partake its rapid transformations; the active enchantment reaches my dust, and I dilate and conspire with the morning wind.  How does Nature deify us with a few and cheap elements!  Give me health and a day, and I will make the pomp of emperors ridiculous.  The dawn is my Assyria; the sunset and moonrise my Paphos, and unimaginable realms of faerie; broad noon shall be my England of the senses and the understanding; the night shall be my Germany of mystic philosophy and dreams.

Not less excellent, except for our less susceptibility in the afternoon, was the charm, last evening, of a January sunset.  The western clouds divided and subdivided themselves into pink flakes modulated with tints of unspeakable softness; and the air had so much life and sweetness that it was a pain to come within doors.  What was it that Nature would say?  Was there no meaning in the live repose of the valley behind the mill, and which Homer or Shakespeare could not re-form for me in words?  The leafless trees become spires of flame in the sunset, with the blue east for their background, and the stars of the dead calices of flowers, and every withered stem and stubble ruined with frost, contribute something to the mute music.

IDEALISM.

[From the same.]

To the senses and the unrenewed understanding belongs a sort of instinctive belief in the absolute existence of nature.  In their view man and nature are indissolubly joined.  Things are ultimates, and they never look beyond their sphere.  The presence of Reason mars this faith. . . .  Nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us.  Certain mechanical changes, a small alteration in our local position, apprises us of a dualism.  We are strangely affected by seeing the shore from a moving ship, from a balloon, or through the tints of an unusual sky.  The least change in our point of view gives the whole world a pictorial air.  A man who seldom rides needs only to get into a coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet-show.  The men, the women—­talking, running, bartering, fighting—­the earnest mechanic, the lounger, the beggar, the boys, the dogs are unrealized at once, or at least wholly detached from all relation to the observer, and seen as apparent, not substantial, beings.