EVENING LANDSCAPE. 331 



expression) my thoughts and feelings as if beating time 

 to the tones of it. The unknown author of " Enthusi- 

 asm"* has made an ingenious distinction between 

 meditation and those more vigorous states of thought in 

 which the cogitative faculties alone are active, and he 

 has said that the former is more characteristic of the 

 Asiatic cast of mind, the latter of the European. If the 

 remark be a just one, I have been quite an Asiatic this 

 evening, if, indeed, we may define meditation to be that 

 state of the mind, in which its better sentiments and its 

 intellectual powers are active together, though perhaps 

 not in an equal degree ; these combining, or creating 

 or arranging, perhaps, slowly and languidly, those looking 

 on with intense delight, rejoicing in every idea, and lov- 

 ing every new or pleasing image with an overpowering 

 love. Take, as illustrative of what I mean, the cogita- 

 tions of a few minutes of this evening. I stood on the 

 sweep of a grassy declivity sprinkled over with forest 

 trees and bushes. Some of the former spring out of the 

 higher edge of the bank, and interlace their boughs at 

 a great height over my head ; some of them have fixed 

 their roots so much farther down, that my eye is on a 

 level with the cradle which the magpie has built for her 

 young among their branches ; I look over the topmost 

 twigs of a still lower tree. See there is the ash, with his 

 long massy arms, that shoot off from the trunk at such 

 acute angles, and his dark sooty blossoms spread over 

 him as if he were mourning ; and there is the elm, with 

 his trunk gnarled and ridged like an Egyptian column, 

 and his flake-like foliage laid on in strips that lie nearly 

 parallel to the horizon ; and there is the plane, with his 

 dark-green leaves and dense heavy outline, like that of 



* Now so well known that it seems almost superfluous to name him, 

 Isaac Taylor. 



