A SUMMER AFTERNOON 123 
joy, and sympathy in trouble, only in books. 
. .. What share have the attractions of nature 
ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests 
and emotions of ourselves or our friends? ... 
There is surely a reason for this want of inborn 
sympathy between the creature and the crea- 
tion around it.” 
Leslie says of “the most original landscape 
painter he knew,” meaning Constable, that, 
whenever he sat down in the fields to sketch, 
he endeavored to forget that he had ever seen 
a picture. In literature this is easy, the de- 
scriptions are so few and so faint. When 
Wordsworth was fourteen, he stopped one day 
by the wayside to observe the dark outline of 
an oak against the western sky; and he says 
that he was at that moment struck with “the 
infinite variety of natural appearances which 
had been unnoticed by the poets of any age or 
country,” so far as he was acquainted with 
them, and “made a resolution to supply in 
some degree the deficiency.” He spent a long 
life in studying and telling these beautiful won- 
ders; and yet, so vast is the sum of them, they 
seem almost as undescribed as before, and men 
to be still as content with vague or conven- 
tional representations. On this continent, 
especially, people fancied that all must be tame 
and second-hand, everything long since duly 
