112 BRAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
garb and colouring of a fantastic dream. But witli 
Nature all is pure, all is true, constant and abiding, and 
from every thread of her endless fabric of loveliness 
comes a voice of sympathy and love. 
Thus it is, that in our earlier life, before the soul is 
enveloped in cobwebs and dust, that the love of nature 
is warmest in the heart; and that ever afterward, when 
that same love awakens in us, we feel the replenished 
vigour of an ascending life, and the untold joy of primal 
beauty. We seem to be brought back again to the 
flowery brink of our budding youth, and to stand once 
more upon the threshold which then separated the sweet 
years of childhood from the mysterious, yet promising 
future which then lay before us; and in which our 
ambition and our hopes were coined into realities, by 
the energies of our hands and the firmness of our 
hearts. 
There is ever hope for that man who feels the fresh¬ 
ness of his youth like a soft fragrance fanning his hot 
brow, when he wanders into the wild solitude, where 
Nature still beams in the radiance of untroubled tran¬ 
quillity, and the hand of man has not yet begun the 
work of demolition, but where all is vigour, and fresh¬ 
ness, and reality. Beside the mountain torrent, gleam¬ 
ing as with the light of a perpetual morning, and in 
the pine woods, where night hovers all day long, he feels 
the purple flush of youth once more upon his cheek, and 
the generous sympathies of his earlier life burning in his 
heart. Then emotions are kindled in the breast, of 
which even an angel might be proud, and to live is a 
joy unutterable. Memory is then a sweet picture; 
