2 
BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
into this professedly simple category. A story, certes, 
should be in chapters, have a beginning and an end, and 
at the end a moral. My story shall conform to rule 
just as its subject is in the way of fashion, and the first 
thought that occurs to me will be the best to lead off 
with for Chapter 
I. THE COLOUR OF IT. 
It is a significant fact, that Nature uses but few colours 
in the painting of her many pictures. The scenery of 
the whole world, with all its diversities of hill and dale, 
land and sea, mountain and valley, exhibit chiefly the 
several shades of blue and green, which are respectively 
the emblems of heaven and earth. It is very simple; 
but with what cunning art does Nature trick out an 
infinity of wild beauty, dotting each little spot of the 
broad earth with a picture of its own, which, in all her 
multitudinous representations, will never be repeated. 
Philosophers tell us that this blue above and green below 
is the combination which, while giving the heart and the 
eye an equal satisfaction and solace, is at the same time 
the best adapted for the continual exercise of the visual 
powers. The soft azure heaven, which folds us in its 
dewy arms, and lifts our souls nearer up to God, is said 
to derive its beauty from the refraction of the rays of light 
in passing through the air. The lovely green hue which 
overspreads the earth like the laughter of Nature herself, 
and which* by its winning tenderness, seems planted here 
to make the soul contented with its earthly lot, is caused 
by the abundant and universal growth of grass, which is, 
indeed, the poetic spirit of the world, for it hides, with 
