DEDICATORY EPISTLE. V 



technical science, but that the reader may not seek in this 

 volume for matters which it does not contain. 



In describing the aspects of nature, I have selected such 

 views as afford me the most pleasure, endeavoring by my 

 manner of presenting them to inspire the reader with the 

 same agreeable sensations. I have aimed, not so much to 

 make a graphic picture of any scene from which a painter 

 might with his brush or pencil obtain a copy on canvas, as, 

 on the other hand, to make the reader feel as he would in the 

 presence of it. I have also confined my descriptions to ordi- 

 nary scenes. These alone have been my study. The objects 

 that meet our view in our walks outside of any village in the 

 country, the beauty of a plain cottage and its picturesque in- 

 mates, with their baskets of whortleberries and their bundles 

 of dried herbs, and the common trees and shrubs of the forest 

 and the wayside, form the subjects of my essays. From them 

 I have studied the oracles of nature, and in these pages I 

 have given their interpretations as I understand them. 



Some of my friends have asked me why I selected so hack- 

 neyed a topic as nature, whose beauties and whose phases 

 have been so often described that every sentence one may 

 write on this subject can hardly be anything more than the 

 repetition of some platitude. I reply that I have described 

 these things because I am familiar with them, and may treat 

 of them without offending popular prejudices, as I might if I 

 were to discourse upon ethics or politics. But the subjects 

 I have chosen are not so hackneyed as many suppose them to 

 be. Popular writers on Nature's aspects have generally been 

 tourists or landscape gardeners ; and her grander scenes have 

 been selected by one class, and artificial or dressed landscape 

 by the other. These matters, as the reader will soon dis- 

 cover, have no part in my descriptions. I ought to allude 

 also to the writers on landscape painting, who, with all their 

 professed admiration of Nature, always place her in subordina- 

 tion to art. 



With regard to the style of these essays, I will only say 

 that it has been my principal aim to express my thoughts with 



