A JOURNEY TO NATURE 



and entertained her unawares. Some of her Darks, 

 as Carlyle calls them, have lightened a little under 

 an equable internal flame. Her horizons are so 

 wide and her balances so perfect, that I do not 

 see how the apothecary observer can help laying 

 aside his small scales, and paying tribute to the 

 immeasurable equilibriums and purposes, or avoid 

 arriving at the serene acknowledgement of a league- 

 less Somewhat to which a universe of things is 

 tending. That he will, if he gives up a little to 

 Nature, become either a Pantheist with some of 

 the philosophers, or a mere gatherer like some of 

 the savants, it is not for me to say. But I feel 

 confident that a healthy adjustment of faculties, 

 and the suspension of an aggressive egotism, put 

 a man en rapport with new harmonies that he never 

 before suspected. If he walk in the cordial but 

 silent woods, he finds that the defiance goes out of 

 his vertebrae, and he is acquiring the bowed head ; 

 and if we look narrowly here we shall find, I 

 think, that the bowed head of the savant and the 

 saint are the tokens of a similar but unequal 

 humility. These conclusions bore into one s old 

 timbers unobserved like the teredo, when one 

 lives apart from his fellows for a while; so that I 

 grew to think with the Doctor, that it was good 

 for every man to have hermit hours, and to keep 

 a wilderness somewhere into which he can escape 

 from himself. In such sequestered moments tides 

 of soft intimations come from afar, and there are 

 apt to be astral banners fluttering in one s out 

 reach whisperings of origins and outcomes, 



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