CHRISTOPHER IN HIS SPORTING JACKET 



outward air. For the senses hear and see all things in 

 their seeming slumbers, from all the impulses that 

 come to them in solitude gaining more, far more, 

 than they have lost! When we are awake, or half 

 awake, or almost sunk into a sleep, they are cease- 

 lessly gathering materials for the thinking and feel- 

 ing soul and it is hers, in a deep delight formed of 

 memory and imagination, to put them together by a 

 divine plastic power, in which she is almost, as it 

 were, a very creator, till she exult to look on beauty 

 and on grandeur such as this earth and these heavens 

 never saw, products of her own immortal and immate- 

 rial energies, and BEING once, to BE for ever, when the 

 universe, with all its suns and systems, is no more ! 



But oftener we and our shadows glided along the 

 gloom at the foot of the cliffs, ear-led by the incessant 

 cry of the young hawks in their nest, ever hungry 

 except when asleep. Left to themselves, when the old 

 birds are hunting, an hour's want of food is felt to be 

 famine, and you hear the cry of the callow creatures, 

 angry with one another, and it may be, fighting with 

 soft beak and pointless claws, till a living lump of 

 down tumbles over the rock-ledge, soon to be picked 

 to the bone by insects, who likewise all live upon 

 prey; for example, Ants of carrion. Get you behind 

 that briery bield, that wild-rose hanging rock, far and 

 wide scenting the wilderness with a faint perfume; 

 [109] 



