HIS ED VGA TION. 501 



be suggested by nature, and come at her prompting. 

 Shakspeare was an educated man ; he had a large know- 

 ledge of the books of his time ; but all generations 

 would have been poorer if his brain had been drugged 

 in boyhood with the trite erudition of Universities. 

 Books came to Miller at the right moment ; when he 

 had already so filled his mind with Nature's imagery 

 that they could do no more than genially assist him to 

 use it. To read him is like taking a walk with him ; 

 we are never far from the crags and the waters, the 

 dewy branch and the purple heather. Compare this 

 with the prim urban elegance of Jeffrey, or the hard 

 vehemence, like rainless thunder, or the full gallop of 

 cavalry, of the style of Sir William Hamilton, and you 

 will begin to realize how much Hugh Miller owed to the 

 circumstance that his Alma Mater was his mother earth. 

 As a naturalist, also, and as a geologist, his power came 

 essentially from the same source. The hours on the 

 ebb shore with Uncle Sandy, the tracing of the subtle- 

 ties of life among the minute denizens of the crystal 

 pools, the watching of the race of the waves when the 

 tide turned, first slowly, tentatively, listlessly, each 

 timorous wavelet with its lifted handful of dusty sand, 

 then in hurrying clamorous advance of leaping foam 

 and marshalled surge along the reaches of the shore, 

 the long years of toil in the quarry, and of wandering 

 among the hills, to mark the fellowship of the rocks, 

 and learn the joints and curvature of the bones of the 

 world, these gave him his intuitive sympathy with 

 Nature's ways, his geological eye to discern how THE 

 ARCHITECT had put together this and that bit of the 

 planet. ' The thing was done so,' he could say, ' and 

 not in the way you mention ; you can fold up your 

 theoretical demonstration when you please.' 



