FIRST IMPRESSIONS OF ENGLAND. 315 



borate literary form with perfect ease and freedom ! 

 And how completely do we feel, as we read, that we are 

 in converse with a cultivated mind ! The treasures 

 which Miller had been accumulating since he was six 

 years old, the impressions, facts, reflections, fancies of 

 life-long observation and study, flow out upon the page 

 in stintless yet chaste abundance, absolutely without 

 straining or parade. There is no gaudy metaphoric 

 daubing, no wearisome drawing out of similitudes, but 

 the right illustration, brief and happy, always comes in 

 at the right place, and the nice bright word of metaphor, 

 like the honey-touch on the lip of Jonathan when he was 

 weary, never fails. 



The skill in which Miller has to this day no rival, 

 the skill of bringing poetic hues and musical tones out 

 of the stony tombs of geology, is in this book exquisitely 

 exhibited. In Dudley glen, for example, he finds him- 

 self surrounded with rocks containing Silurian fossils of 

 remote antiquity amid and upon which stand the ordinary 

 trees of English woodland. This is enough to awaken his 

 fancy. ' I scarcely know,' he says, ' on what principle it 

 should have occurred ; but certainly never before, even 

 when considerably less familiar with the wonders of geo- 

 logy, was I so impressed by the appearance of marine 

 fossils in an inland district, as among these wooded soli- 

 tudes. Perhaps the peculiarity of their setting, if I may so 

 speak, by heightening the contrast between their present 

 circumstances and their original habitat, gave increased 

 effect to their appeals to the imagination. The green 

 ocean depths in which they must have lived and died 

 associate strangely in the mind with the forest retreats, 

 a full hundred miles from the sea-shore, in which their 

 remains now lie deposited. Taken with their accom- 

 paniments, they serve to remind one of that style of 



