256 STUDIES IN THE FIELD AND FOREST. 



afford him scenes always charming and never tiresome, 

 fraught with lessons of divine wisdom arid benevolence, 

 never heard from the lips of man, and read only in the 

 works of him who silently shows forth his wonders in 

 the landscape and the firmament. 



As the most delightful views of the ocean are ob 

 tained when a small part of it is seen through a green 

 recess in a wood, for the same reason, the blue sky is 

 never so beautiful as when seen through the openings of 

 clouds. The emotion produced by any scene whatever 

 is always more intense, when the greater part of the 

 object is hidden, leaving room for the entrance of fanci 

 ful images into the mind. Clouds are peculiarly sug 

 gestive on account of the ambiguity of their shapes, 

 and their constant changes of form and arrangement. 

 No person can look at their radiant groups, if he possess 

 any liveliness of fancy, without indulging a variety of 

 poetic vagaries. Nothing, indeed, in nature so closely 

 resembles the mysterious operations of thought, ever 

 ceaseless in their motions, and ever varying in their 

 combinations; now passing from a shapeless heap into 

 a finely marshalled band, then dissolving into the 

 pellucid atmosphere, as a series of thoughts will pass 

 away from our memory ; then slowly forming them 

 selves again, and recombining in a still more beautiful 

 and dazzling congeries, in another part of the sky ; now 

 gloomy, changeable, and formless, then assuming a 

 definite shape, and glowing with the most lovely beams 

 of light and beauty ; and lastly, fading into darkness 

 when the sun departs, as the mind for a short period 

 becomes obliterated in sleep. 



Perhaps not every one has observed, that in the even 

 ing after the hues of the clouds have once faded, they 

 are often reilluminated before darkness comes on. Im- 



