“There is an inward voice, that in the stream
   Sends forth its spirit to the listening ear,
   And in a calm content it floweth on,
   Like wisdom, welcome with its own respect. 
   Clear in its breast lie all these beauteous thoughts,
   It doth receive the green and graceful trees,
   And the gray rocks smile in its peaceful arms.”

And more he sung, but too serious for our page.  For every oak and birch too growing on the hill-top, as well as for these elms and willows, we knew that there was a graceful ethereal and ideal tree making down from the roots, and sometimes Nature in high tides brings her mirror to its foot and makes it visible.  The stillness was intense and almost conscious, as if it were a natural Sabbath, and we fancied that the morning was the evening of a celestial day.  The air was so elastic and crystalline that it had the same effect on the landscape that a glass has on a picture, to give it an ideal remoteness and perfection.  The landscape was clothed in a mild and quiet light, in which the woods and fences checkered and partitioned it with new regularity, and rough and uneven fields stretched away with lawn-like smoothness to the horizon, and the clouds, finely distinct and picturesque, seemed a fit drapery to hang over fairy-land.  The world seemed decked for some holiday or prouder pageantry, with silken streamers flying, and the course of our lives to wind on before us like a green lane into a country maze, at the season when fruit-trees are in blossom.

Why should not our whole life and its scenery be actually thus fair and distinct?  All our lives want a suitable background.  They should at least, like the life of the anchorite, be as impressive to behold as objects in the desert, a broken shaft or crumbling mound against a limitless horizon.  Character always secures for itself this advantage, and is thus distinct and unrelated to near or trivial objects, whether things or persons.  On this same stream a maiden once sailed in my boat, thus unattended but by invisible guardians, and as she sat in the prow there was nothing but herself between the steersman and the sky.  I could then say with the poet,—­

“Sweet falls the summer air
Over her frame who sails with me;
Her way like that is beautifully free,
Her nature far more rare,
And is her constant heart of virgin purity.”

At evening still the very stars seem but this maiden’s emissaries and reporters of her progress.

Low in the eastern sky
Is set thy glancing eye;
And though its gracious light
Ne’er riseth to my sight,
Yet every star that climbs
Above the gnarled limbs
Of yonder hill,
Conveys thy gentle will.

   Believe I knew thy thought,
   And that the zephyrs brought
   Thy kindest wishes through,
   As mine they bear to you,
   That some attentive cloud
   Did pause amid the crowd
       Over my head,
   While gentle things were said.