true, must be the flowing of the giver unto
me, correspondent to my flowing unto him.
When the waters are at level, then my goods
pass to him, and his to me. All his are mine,
all mine his. I say to him, How can you give
me this pot of oil, or this flagon of wine,
when all your oil and wine is mine, which
belief of mine this gift seems to deny? Hence
the fitness of beautiful, not useful things for
gifts. This giving is flat usurpation, and
therefore when the beneficiary is ungrateful,
as all beneficiaries hate all Timons, not at
all considering the value of the gift, but
looking back to the greater store it was
taken from, I rather sympathize with the
beneficiary, than with the anger of my lord
Timon. For, the expectation of gratitude
is mean, and is continually punished by the
total insensibility of the obliged person. It
is a great happiness to get off without injury
and heart-burning, from one who has had
the ill luck to be served by you.
It is a very
onerous business, this of being served, and
the debtor naturally wishes to give you a
slap. A golden text for these gentlemen is
that which I so admire in the Buddhist, who
never thanks, and who says, "Do not
flatter your benefactors."

The reason of these discords I conceive to be, that there is no commensurability between a man and any gift. You cannot give anything to a magnanimous person. After you have served him, he at once puts you in debt by his magnanimity. The service a man renders his friend is trivial and selfish, compared with the service he knows his friend stood in readiness to yield him, alike before he had begun to serve his friend, and now also. Compared with that goodwill I bear my friend, the benefit it is in my power to render him seems small. Besides, our action on each other, good as well as evil, is so incidental and at random, that we can seldom hear the acknowledgments of any person who would thank us for a benefit, without some shame and humiliation. We can rarely strike a direct stroke, but must be content with an oblique one; we seldom have the satisfaction of yielding a direct benefit, which is directly received. But rectitude scatters favours on every side without knowing it, and receives with wonder the thanks of all people.

I

like to see that we cannot be bought and sold. The best of hospitality and of generosity is also not in the will, but in fate. find that I am not much to you; you do not need me; you do not feel me; then am I thrust out of doors, though you proffer me house and lands. No services are of any value, but only likeness. When I have attempted to join myself to others by services, it proved an intellectual trick,—no more. They eat your service like apples, and leave you out. But love them, and they feel you, and delight in you all the time.

NATURE.

The rounded world is fair to see,
Nine times folded in mystery:
Though baffled seers cannot impart
The secret of its labouring heart,
Throb thine with Nature's throbbing breast,
And all is clear from east to west.
Spirit that lurks each form within
Beckons to spirit of its kin;
Self-kindled every atom glows,

And hints the future which it owes. THERE are days which occur in this climate, at almost any season of the year, wherein the world reaches its perfection, when the air, the heavenly bodies, and the earth make a harmony, as if Nature would indulge her offspring; when, in these bleak upper sides of the planet, nothing is to desire that we have heard of the happiest latitudes, and we bask in the shining hours of Florida and Cuba; when everything that has life gives signs of satisfaction, and the cattle that lie on the ground seem to have great and tranquil thoughts. These halcyons may be looked for with a little more assurance in that pure October weather, which we distinguish by the name of the Indian summer. The day, immeasurably long, sleeps over the broad hills and warm wide fields. To have lived through all its sunny hours seems longevity enough. The solitary places do not seem quite lonely. At the gates of the forest, the surprised man of the world is forced to leave his city estimates of great and small, wise and foolish. The knapsack of I fear to breathe any treason against the custom falls off his back with the first step majesty of love, which is the genius and god he makes into these precincts. Here is of gifts, and to whom we must not affect sanctity which shames our religions, and to prescribe. Let him give kingdoms or reality which discredits our heroes. Here flower-leaves indifferently. There are per- we find Nature to be the circumstance which sons, from whom we always expect fairy-dwarfs every other circumstance, and judges tokens ; let us not cease to expect them. like a god all men that come to her. We This is prerogative, and not to be limited have crept out of our close and crowded by our municipal rules. For the rest, I houses into the night and morning, and we

natural object. The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving ryefield; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south-wind, which converts all trees to wind-harps; the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames; or of pine logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room,-these are the music and pictures of the most ancient reli

see what majestic beauties daily wrap us in their bosom. How willingly we would escape the barriers which render them comparatively impotent, escape the sophistication and second thought, and suffer nature to entrance us. The tempered light of the woods is like a perpetual morning, and is stimulating and heroic. The anciently reported spells of these places creep on us. The stems of pines, hemlocks, and oaks almost gleam like iron on the excited eye. The incommunicable trees begin to persuade us to live with them, and quit our life of solemn trifles. Here no history, or church, or state is interpolated on the divine sky and the im-gion. My house stands in low land, with mortal year. How easily we might walk limited outlook, and on the skirt of the vilonward into the opening landscape, absorbed lage. But I go with my friend to the shore by new pictures, and by thoughts fast suc- of our little river, and with one stroke of the ceeding each other, until by degrees the paddle, I leave the village politics and perrecollection of home was crowded out of sonalities, yes, and the world of villages and the mind, all memory obliterated by the personalities behind, and pass into a delicate tyranny of the present, and we were led in realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright triumph by nature. almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation. We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty; we dip our hands in this painted element: our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms. A holiday, a villeggiatura, a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valour and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant. These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it. I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces. Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty. I am overinstructed for my return. Henceforth I shall be hard to please. I cannot go back to toys. I am grown expensive and sophisticated. I can no longer live without elegance: but a countryman shall be my master of revels. He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground, the waters, the plants, the heavens, and how to come at these enchantments, is the rich and royal man. Only as far as the masters of the world have called in nature to their aid, can they reach the height of magnificence. This is the meaning of their hanging-gardens, villas, garden-houses, islands, parks, and preserves, to back their faulty personality with these strong accessories. I do not wonder that the landed interest should be invincible in the state with these dangerous auxiliaries. These bribe and invite; not kings, not palaces, not men, not women, but these tender and poetic stars, eloquent of secret promises. We heard what the rich man said, we knew of his villa, his grove,

These enchantments are medicinal, they sober and heal us. These are plain pleasures, kindly and native to us. We come to our own, and make friends with matter, which the ambitious chatter of the schools would persuade us to despise. We never can part with it; the mind loves its old home; as water to our thirst, so is the rock, the ground, to our eyes, and hands, and feet. It is firm water it is cold flame: what health, what affinity! Ever an old friend, ever like a dear friend and brother when we chat affectedly with strangers, comes in this honest face, and takes a grave liberty with us, and shames us out of our nonsense. Cities give not the human senses room enough. We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath. There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul. There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveller rushes for safety,-and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon. We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future. The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet. I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel and Uriel, the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.

It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have given heed to some

his wine, and his company, but the provo- difference between landscape and landscape cation and point of the invitation came out is small, but there is great difference in the of these beguiling stars. In their soft glances, beholders. There is nothing so wonderful I see what men strove to realize in some in any particular landscape, as the necessity Versailles, or Paphos, or Ctesiphon. In- of being beautiful under which every landdeed, it is the magical lights of the horizon, scape lies. Nature cannot be surprised in and the blue sky for the background, which undress. Beauty breaks in everywhere. save all our works of art, which were other- But it is very easy to outrun the sympathy wise bawbles. When the rich tax the poor of readers on this topic, which schoolmen with servility and obsequiousness, they should called natura naturata, or nature passive. consider the effect of men reputed to be the One can hardly speak directly of it without possessors of nature, on imaginative minds. | excess. It is as easy to broach in mixed Ah! if the rich were rich as the poor fancy companies what is called "the subject of riches! A boy hears a military band play religion." A susceptible person does not on the field at night, and he has kings and like to indulge his tastes in this kind, without queens, and famous chivalry palpably before the apology of some trivial necessity: he him. He hears the echoes of a horn in a goes to see a wood-lot, or to look at the hill country, in the Notch Mountains, for crops, or to fetch a plant or a mineral from example, which converts the mountains into a remote locality, or he carries a fowlingan Æolian harp, and this supernatural tira- piece or a fishing-rod. I suppose this shame lira restores to him the Dorian mythology, must have a good reason. A dilettanteism Apollo, Diana, and all divine hunters and in nature is barren and unworthy. The fop huntresses. Can a musical note be so lofty, of fields is no better than his brother of so haughtily beautiful! To the poor young Broadway. Men are naturally hunters and poet, thus fabulous is his picture of society; inquisitive of wood-craft, and I suppose he is loyal; he respects the rich; they are that such a gazetteer as wood-cutters and rich for the sake of his imagination; how Indians should furnish facts for, would take poor his fancy would be, if they were not place in the most sumptuous drawing-rooms rich! That they have some high-fenced of all the "Wreaths and "Flora's chapgrove, which they call a park! that they lets" of the bookshops; yet ordinarily, live in larger and better-garnished saloons whether we are too clumsy for so subtle a than he has visited, and go in coaches, keep- topic, or from whatever cause, as soon as ing only the society of the elegant, to water- men begin to write on nature, they fall into ing-places, and to distant cities, are the euphuism. Frivolity is a most unfit tribute groundwork from which he has delineated to Pan, who ought to be represented in the estates of romance, compared with which mythology as the most continent of gods. their actual possessions are shanties and I would not be frivolous before the admirpaddocks. The nurse herself betrays her able reserve and prudence of time, yet I son, and enhances the gifts of wealth and cannot renounce the right of returning often well-born beauty, by a radiation out of the to this old topic. The multitude of false air, and clouds, and forests that skirt the churches accredits the true religion. Literroad, a certain haughty favour, as if from ature, poetry, science, are the homage of patrician genii to patricians, a kind of aris- man to this unfathomed secret, concerning tocracy in nature, a prince of the power of which no sane man can affect an indifference the air. or incuriosity. Nature is loved by what is best in us. It is loved as the city of God, although,_ or rather because, there is no citizen. The sunset is unlike anything that is underneath it it wants men. And the beauty of nature must always seem unreal and mocking, until the landscape has human figures, that are as good as itself. If there were good men, there would never be this rapture in nature. If the king is in the palace, nobody looks at the walls. It is when he is gone, and the house is filled with grooms and gazers, that we turn from the people, to find relief in the majestic men that are suggested by the pictures and the architecture. The critics who complain of the sickly separation of the beauty of nature from the thing to be done, must consider

The moral sensibility which makes Edens and Tempes so easily, may not be always found, but the material landscape is never far off. We can find these enchantments without visiting the Como Lake, or the Madeira Islands. We exaggerate the praises of local scenery. In every landscape, the point of astonishment is the meeting of the sky and the earth, and that is seen from the first hillock as well as from the top of the Alleghanies. The stars at night stoop down over the brownest, homeliest common, with all the spiritual magnificence which they shed on the Campagna, or on the marble deserts of Egypt. The uprolled clouds and the colours of morning and evening will transfigure maples and alders. The

that our hunting of the picturesque is in-
separable from our protest against false
society. Man is fallen; nature is erect and
serves as a differential thermometer, de-
tecting the presence or absence of the divine
sentiment in man. By fault of our dulness
and selfishness we are looking up to nature;
but when we are convalescent, nature will
look up to us.
We see the foaming brook
with compunction: if our own life flowed
with the right energy, we should shame the
brook.
The stream of zeal sparkles with
real fire, and not with reflex rays of sun and
moon. Nature may be as selfishly studied
as trade. Astronomy to the selfish becomes
astrology; psychology, mesmerism (with
intent to show where our spoons are gone);
and anatomy and physiology become phren-
ology and palmistry.

the signet of a ring. The whirling bubble on the surface of a brook admits us to the secret of the mechanics of the sky. Every shell on the beach is a key to it. A little water made to rotate in a cup explains the formation of the simpler shells; the addition of matter from year to year, arrives at last at the most complex forms; and yet so poor is Nature with all her craft, that, from the beginning to the end of the universe, she has but one stuff,--but one stuff with its two ends, to serve up all her dream-like variety. Compound it how she will, star, sand, fire, water, tree, man, it is still one stuff, and betrays the same properties.

She

Nature is always consistent, though she feigns to contravene her own laws. keeps her laws, and seems to transcend them. She arms and equips an animal to find its place and living in the earth, and, at the same time, she arms and equips another animal to destroy it. Space exists to divide creatures; but by clothing the sides of a bird with a few feathers, she gives him a petty omnipresence. The direction is for ever onward, but the artist still goes back

first elements on the most advanced stage: otherwise, all goes to ruin. If we look at her work, we seem to catch a glance of a system in transition. Plants are the young of the world, vessels of health and vigour; but they grope ever upward towards consciousness; the trees are imperfect men, and seem to bemoan their imprisonment, rooted in the ground. The animal is the novice and probationer of a more advanced order. The men, though young, having tasted the first drop from the cup of thought, are already dissipated; the maples and ferns are still uncorrupt; yet no doubt, when they come to consciousness, they too will curse and swear. Flowers so strictly belong to youth, that we adult men soon come to feel, that their beautiful generations concern not us: we have had our day; now let the children have theirs. The flowers jilt us, and we are old bachelors with our ridiculous tenderness.

But taking timely warning, and leaving many things unsaid on this topic, let us not longer omit our homage to the Efficient Nature, natura naturans, the quick cause, before which all forms flee as the driven snows, itself secret, its works driven before it in flocks and multitudes (as the ancients represented nature by Proteus, a shepherd), for materials, and begins again with the and in undescribable variety. It publishes itself in creatures, reaching from particles and spicula, through transformation on transformation to the highest symmetries, arriving at consummate results without a shock or a leap. A little heat, that is, a little motion, is all that differences the bald, dazzling white, and deadly cold poles of the earth from the prolific tropical climates. All changes pass without violence, by reason of the two cardinal conditions of boundless space and boundless time. Geology has initiated us into the secularity of nature, and taught us to disuse our dame-school measures, and exchange our Mosaic and Ptolemaic schemes for her large style. We knew nothing rightly, for want of perspective. Now we learn what patient periods must round themselves before the rock is formed, then before the rock is broken, and the first lichen race has disintegrated the thinnest external plate into soil, and opened the door for the remote Flora, Fauna, Ceres, and Pomona to come in. How far off yet is the trilobite! how far the quadruped! how inconceivably remote is man! All duly arrive, and then race after race of men. It is a long way from granite to the oyster; farther yet to Plato, and the preaching of the immortality of the soul. Yet all must come, as surely as the first atom has two sides.

Motion or change, and identity or rest, are the first and second secrets of nature : Motion and Rest. The whole code of her laws may be written on the thumbnail, or

Things are so strictly related, that according to the skill of the eye, from any one object the parts and properties of any other may be predicted. If we had eyes to see it, a bit of stone from the city wall would certify us of the necessity that man must exist, as readily as the city. That identity makes us all one, and reduces to nothing great intervals on our customary scale. We talk of deviations from natural life, as if artificial life were not also natural. The smoothest curled courtier in the boudoirs of a palace has an animal nature, rude and aboriginal as a white