give not the human senses room enough.  We go out daily and nightly to feed the eyes on the horizon, and require so much scope, just as we need water for our bath.  There are all degrees of natural influence, from these quarantine powers of nature, up to her dearest and gravest ministrations to the imagination and the soul.  There is the bucket of cold water from the spring, the wood-fire to which the chilled traveler rushes for safety,—­and there is the sublime moral of autumn and of noon.  We nestle in nature, and draw our living as parasites from her roots and grains, and we receive glances from the heavenly bodies, which call us to solitude, and foretell the remotest future.  The blue zenith is the point in which romance and reality meet.  I think, if we should be rapt away into all that we dream of heaven, and should converse with Gabriel[473] and Uriel,[474] the upper sky would be all that would remain of our furniture.

3.  It seems as if the day was not wholly profane, in which we have given heed to some natural object.  The fall of snowflakes in a still air, preserving to each crystal its perfect form; the blowing of sleet over a wide sheet of water, and over plains; the waving rye-fields; the mimic waving of acres of houstonia, whose innumerable florets whiten and ripple before the eye; the reflections of trees and flowers in glassy lakes; the musical steaming odorous south wind, which converts all trees to wind-harps;[475] the crackling and spurting of hemlock in the flames; or of pine-logs, which yield glory to the walls and faces in the sitting-room,—­these are the music and pictures of the most ancient religion.  My house stands in low land, with limited outlook, and on the skirt of the village.[476] But I go with my friend[477] to the shore of our little river,[478] and with one stroke of the paddle, I leave the village politics and personalities, yes, and the world of villages and personalities behind, and pass into a delicate realm of sunset and moonlight, too bright almost for spotted man to enter without novitiate and probation.[479] We penetrate bodily this incredible beauty:  we dip our hands in this painted element:  our eyes are bathed in these lights and forms.  A holiday, a villeggiatura,[480] a royal revel, the proudest, most heart-rejoicing festival that valor and beauty, power and taste, ever decked and enjoyed, establishes itself on the instant.  These sunset clouds, these delicately emerging stars, with their private and ineffable glances, signify it and proffer it.  I am taught the poorness of our invention, the ugliness of towns and palaces.  Art and luxury have early learned that they must work as enhancement and sequel to this original beauty.  I am overinstructed for my return.  Henceforth I shall be hard to please.  I cannot go back to toys.  I am grown expensive and sophisticated.  I can no longer live without elegance:  but a countryman shall be my master of revels.  He who knows the most, he who knows what sweets and virtues are in the ground,