114 A RAMBLE TO BRANDY COVE. 



for the mower ; the wind sweeps over both, and we 

 trace its course by the eye ; but the effect on one is 

 very different from that on the other. On the young 

 corn the waves give a bluish green, a sort of hoary 

 glaucous tint, as they pass, and have not the fairy 

 lightness of the waving grass in flower, over whose 

 gray and russet surface silvery flittings sweep so 

 lightly, that you might imagine Queen Mab and her 

 airy troop were speeding over it. The fields are 

 sloping away in all sorts of ways. I am sure there is 

 a brook down there in that dark corner between the 

 wheat and the grass ; I cannot see any sparkling of 

 water, but I know it by the look of the trees ; they 

 are so dense, and there is such an obscurity, a black- 

 ness, in and under their screening foliage, as only the 

 vicinity of water gives ; it is just such a little patch 

 of deepest shadow in the sunny scene as an artistic 

 eye would delight in. There is the dusty, drab-hued 

 road, winding up between those hedges, half-hidden 

 as it winds ; the farm-buildings yonder in the bot- 

 tom ; the old church peeping over the hill, the ridges 

 of its triple roof just in sight, and its square gray 

 tower, with a vane at each of its four corners, all 

 pointing the same way ; an emblem of what the church 

 ought to be, rather than what she is, with all her 

 ministries directing the soul to Him who is the living 

 way, the only way, to God. The summits of those 

 broken hills close the view as with a wall ; but 

 between them there is just a peep of the ever-lovely 

 sea ; and a minute vessel far off, making her way up 



