SUN AND AIR. 37 



mediately home to practical utility. The sun and the 

 atmosphere, for the changes of which and their influence, 

 the seasons are but other names, are really and im- 

 mediately the sources of all that we enjoy, the very 

 first elements of life, and of ten fold, nay ten thousand 

 fold, more value than all else that we can possess. 

 Deprive man of the sun, and as soon as the store 

 which the bounty of that luminary left him is ex- 

 hausted, he must pine to death : deprive him of the 

 atmosphere, and there is an end of him in an instant. 

 When we ramble amid the vernal blossoms and the 

 summer sweets, where the eye turns delighted from 

 beauty to beauty, and perfume vies with perfume 

 which shall refresh and delight us the most, we ought 

 never to forget that the sun is the sole painter, that 

 the beam of light is both the form and the colours ; 

 that the same sun elaborates the perfume; and that the 

 air, at the same time that it sustains life, is the mes- 

 senger that wafts it to the sense. So also, for all that 

 is dainty to the palate we are indebted to the same 

 agents. Not only for the more delicious fruits, which 

 we find, by many years' experience, to be racy in pro- 

 portion as the sun has warmed and the air fanned 

 them, but for every thing that we can use as food, we 

 are still indebted to the sun and the air. We could 

 have no land plant or animal without them ; we could 

 not have so much as a sea weed or an oyster from the 

 bed of the ocean ; nay, we could not obtain a draught 

 of water itself : for without the sun it would be ice, and 

 without air it would be tasteless and insipid. It need 

 not be said that there is heat in the earth, that water 

 drawn from a depth not only never freezes, but never 



