NATURE AND HER HARMONIES. 29 



step forth suddenly before the world's eye, cap-a-pie, in 

 shining armor, becoming men of renown in the fight of faith, 

 or the weary marches of science. We have a strong incli- 

 nation to set up for one of these vulgar JSTewtons ourselves, 

 with the permission of the benevolent reader, as we are about 

 to be guilty of an audacious speculation and if we were not 

 perhaps as much in joke as in earnest, we might be glad to dep- 

 recate responsibility, on the plea of " unsophisticated genius," 

 &c. ; but though one sense of " unsophisticated" may suit us 

 well enough, yet we hardly dare to claim shelter under any 

 other sense of a name so sacred in the mythos of human hope, 



It may be only one of those dreams which, like the poet's 

 ideal, haunts men from and in boyhood. We were then, as 

 is usual, much fonder of the great wide pages, shadowy, wav- 

 ing, glittering and green, of nature's writing, than all the 

 black-letter tomes that ever wearied eye of scholar. And 

 while a scape-grace and hopeless truant, we paddled, bare-foot, 

 through the pebbly brook, tore our juvenile trousers climb- 

 ing for young squirrels, or winning a freckled necklace of 

 birds' eggs for our blue-eyed sweetheart. We had a faint 

 conception that the language we read there should be trans- 

 lated ! Not that which we read in the blue eyes, specially, 

 do we mean ; but on the general page of the living revela- 

 tion ; for as we said 'our incorrigible visuals would not even 

 then permit us to see that Reason and Instinct were alto- 

 gether unlike. 



We took in our hands a definition of Reason, accepted by 

 the sages, and went out among these sentient, breathing 

 forms of life, condemned by them to the blind guidance and 

 fatality of Instinct, that we might compare the theory of one 

 with the reality of the other. 



The song-bird twittered at us ; the wild deer turned to 

 stare ; the squirrel sputtered from his nut-crammed jaws, and 

 the insects buzzed curiously around us for the story got out 

 that there was " a chiel amang 'em takin' notes," and they 

 did not understand but that we meant them some imperti- 



