AUGUST. 315 



Ah ! it is the love of nature that burns within our 

 bosoms ; the instinctive admiration of those woods, 

 dark in shadow or hallowed by the coloured iris ; those 

 cliffs now lit up in gold, or gray in twilight; those 

 ravines whose depths are hidden in foliage, and into 

 which the river plunges with sullen roar ; those land- 

 scapes with all their waters and all their inhabitants, 

 that solemnly robed in the mists of morning, or splen- 

 didly revealed before the setting sun of evening, with 

 all their associations, and all the thoughts and reflec- 

 tions they create and absorb, that charm, enchant, and 

 enchain us. "Whatever our avocations may be, what- 

 ever may be the object or the pretence with which 

 we set out, when once under the open canopy of 

 heaven, we are free ; that machinery spreads before 

 us in its simplicity and complexity, that requires no 

 sighs, groans, or anguish, to keep up its movements ; 

 and that pure brisk air which the country only knows, 

 is in motion to fan our foreheads, fill our lungs, and 

 excite us to hope, thought, and inspiration ! The love, 

 then, of nature in her wild aspects, is common to all 

 minds, and penetrates, more or less, to all breasts, 

 the rude Indian of the Missisippi feels these emotions 

 in his hunting grounds, and they instil delight to his 

 untutored soul; nor does the English fox-hunter, 

 arrayed in his scarlet uniform, who gallops twenty or 

 thirty miles without ever seeing the fox he is pursu- 

 ing, return for all that bootless, or without a flying 

 glimpse of nature's changing pictures flashing upon 

 his view to say nothing of the music of the yelping 

 hounds, the glories of a teazing fence, or the excite- 

 ment of a flop into some cooling and meandering 

 stream. 



