56 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 



dance a shapeless game of evasion, and go into the pine woods or 

 mountain solitudes, where Xaturc still wears the freshness of a 

 primeval morning, and awaits with complacent brow, and meekly 

 folded hands, the appeals of her repentant children ; we come into the 

 sheen and lustre of a new-made life, and grow young again in the 

 beauty and simplicity of a rugged and heroic virtue. The soul, 

 tattered and despoiled, and weather-beaten in the strife and storm of 

 petty contentions and mean and degrading tendencies, awakens again 

 to the vigour and freshness of its true life, and seems to have been 

 made anew. With men, the true soul seems ever in the presence of 

 a blight or pestilence, and droops and fades as in the hot and parching 

 air of a sirocco : but with nature, the true old love of innumerable 

 ages comes dawning upon it, and it grows and expands in the opening 

 of a new future, a future teeming with truth and beauty ; and finds 

 in this new realm of thought and perception, an insight into its highest 

 tendencies. In the buzz and distracting whirl of the world, the only 

 hope of satisfaction seems to be in sorrow, for there we expect to meet 

 with "sharp peaks and edges of truth ;" but in nature, all is perpetual 

 jubilee and song, and every feature wears the aspect of festive hilarity, 

 — pure, ennobling and true. The sunshine of Paphian skies seems 

 ever dawning upon the horizon of a holier hope, the warmth and 

 fruition of a new summer seems ever alighting upon the petals of un- 

 fading flowers, and in the dark brows of Dodonian oaks we see the 

 type of ceaseless renewal, and unspared exuberance. The soul grows 

 and grows, and feels in its inmost recesses the awakening light and 

 divinity of its highest spiritual truths. 



Life is a constant flux of moods or conditions, evanescent and trans- 

 mutable, yet together forming a great circle in which the true character 

 is encentred. Be the mood what it may, it is but a reflex of the com- 

 bined conditions of the true character which lies beneath, and the 

 outward and visible influences which surround us. Every man wishes 

 for good, wishes to attain to the practice of virtue, and to gather to 

 himself the noblest thoughts ; but while we glide hither and thither 

 under masks and pretensions, we mutually deceive ourselves and 

 others, and the world comes at last to wear the garb and colouring of 

 a fantastic dream. But with Nature all is pure, all is true, constant 

 and abiding, and from every thread of her endless fabric of loveliness 

 comes a voice of sympathy and love. 



Thus it is that in our earlier life, before the soul is enveloped in 



