THE INNER LIFE. 57 



cobwebs and dust, tbat the love of nature is warmest in the heart ; 

 and that ever afterward, when that same love awakens in us, we 

 feel the replenished vigour of an ascending life, and the untold joy of 

 primal beauty. "We seem to be brought back again to the flowery 

 brink of our budding youth, and to stand once more upon the 

 threshold which then separated the sweet years of childhood from 

 the mysterious, yet promising future which then lay before us ; and in 

 which our ambition and our hopes were coined into realities, by the 

 energies of our hands and the firmness of our hearts. 



There is ever hope for that man who feels the freshness of his youth 

 like a soft fi-agrance fanning his hot brow, when he wanders into the 

 wild solitude, where nature still beams in the radiance of untroubled 

 tranquillity, and the hand of man has not yet begun the work of demo- 

 lition, but where all is vigour, and freshness, and reality. Beside the 

 mountain torrent, gleaming as with the soft light of a perpetual morn- 

 ing, and in the pine woods, where night hovers all day long, he feels 

 the purple flush of youth once more upon his cheek, and the generous 

 sympathies of his earlier life burning in his heart. Then emotions 

 are kindled in the breast, of which even an angel might be proud, and 

 to live is a joy unutterable. Memory is then a sweet picture ; Love 

 is an odour breathing of Heaven ; Hope sits beside us and points up- 

 wards lovingly, and the inheritance of life is a boon more sacred than 

 the possession of a world, for it gives us more than a world — an 

 Universe of beauty within ourselves. 



This is why, in the first efibrts of the anxious heart, that all books 

 which set forth the harmonies of nature are eagerly devoured. Every 

 genuine student will remember when the most simple and unassuming 

 books possessed inexpressible charms, if they but spoke in harmony 

 with the poetry and moral sympathies which dwelt within his own 

 breast ; if they breathed of green fields and flowers, and sought to 

 embody and embalm all that was beautiful in sentiment, and simple 

 in thought. When we look back to our earliest readings in the great 

 book of nature, and our first commimings with nature's worshippers, 

 we seem carried to some sweet oasis in the dreary wilderness of life, 

 where nothing but beauty, and the aspirations for a higher life could 

 find a place. Then every book which had the least smell of green 

 fields or water brooks, or was in any way imbued with the poetry of 

 nature, was devoured page by page, as if it were manna but just fallen 

 from heaven. 



