by taking hold of the doomed hair, and then giving you a knock on the head that brought tears to your eyes.  For, in the more vivid sensation of that knock you never felt the little twitch of the hair as it quitted its hold.  Yes, the stronger impression makes you unaware of the weaker.  And the impression produced either upon thought or feeling by outward scenes, is so much weaker than that produced by the companionship of our kind, that in the presence of the latter influence, the former remains unfelt, even by men upon whom it would tell powerfully in the absence of another.  And so it is upon the lonely man that skies and mountains, woods and fields and rivers, tell with their full effect; it is to him that they become a part of life; it is in him that they make the inner shade or sunshine, and originate and direct the processes of the intellect.  You go out to take a walk with a friend:  you get into a conversation that interests and engrosses you.  And thus engrossed, you hardly remark the hedges between which you walk, or the soft outline of distant summer hills.  After the first half-mile, you are proof against the influence of the dull December sky, or the still October woods.  But when you go out for your solitary walk, unless your mind be very much preoccupied indeed, your feeling and mood are at the will of external nature.  And after a few hundred yards, unless the matter which was in your mind at starting be of a very worrying and painful character, you begin gradually to take your tone from the sky above you, and the ground on which you tread.  You hear the birds, which, walking with a sympathetic companion, you would never have noticed.  You feel the whole spirit of the scene, whether cheerful or gloomy, gently pervading you, and sinking into your heart.  I do not know how far all this, continued through months or years of comparative loneliness, may permanently affect character; we can stand a great deal of kneading without being lastingly affected, either for better or worse; but there can be no question at all, that in a solitary life nature rises into a real companion, producing upon our present mood a real effect.  As more articulate and louder voices die away upon our ear, we begin to hear the whisper of trees, the murmur of brooks, the song of birds, with a distinctness and a meaning not known before.

The influence of nature on most minds is likely to be a healthful one; still, it is not desirable to allow that influence to become too strong.  And there is a further influence which is felt in a solitary life, which ought never to be permitted to gain the upper hand.  I mean the influence of our own mental moods.  It is not expedient to lead too subjective a life.  We look at all things, doubtless, through our own atmosphere; our eyes, to a great extent, make the world they see.  And no doubt, too, it is the sunshine within the breast that has most power to brighten; and the thing that can do most to darken is the shadow there.  Still, it is not fit that