It helps the sun to shine, and his rays fall on its page to illustrate it.  It spends the mornings and the evenings, and makes such an impression on us overnight as to awaken us before dawn, and its influence lingers around us like a fragrance late into the day.  It conveys a new gloss to the meadows and the depths of the wood, and its spirit, like a more subtile ether, sweeps along with the prevailing winds of a country.  The very locusts and crickets of a summer day are but later or earlier glosses on the Dherma Sastra of the Hindoos, a continuation of the sacred code.  As we have said, there is an orientalism in the most restless pioneer, and the farthest west is but the farthest east.  While we are reading these sentences, this fair modern world seems only a reprint of the Laws of Menu with the gloss of Culluca.  Tried by a New England eye, or the mere practical wisdom of modern times, they are the oracles of a race already in its dotage, but held up to the sky, which is the only impartial and incorruptible ordeal, they are of a piece with its depth and serenity, and I am assured that they will have a place and significance as long as there is a sky to test them by.

Give me a sentence which no intelligence can understand.  There must be a kind of life and palpitation to it, and under its words a kind of blood must circulate forever.  It is wonderful that this sound should have come down to us from so far, when the voice of man can be heard so little way, and we are not now within ear-shot of any contemporary.  The woodcutters have here felled an ancient pine forest, and brought to light to these distant hills a fair lake in the southwest; and now in an instant it is distinctly shown to these woods as if its image had travelled hither from eternity.  Perhaps these old stumps upon the knoll remember when anciently this lake gleamed in the horizon.  One wonders if the bare earth itself did not experience emotion at beholding again so fair a prospect.  That fair water lies there in the sun thus revealed, so much the prouder and fairer because its beauty needed not to be seen.  It seems yet lonely, sufficient to itself, and superior to observation.—­So are these old sentences like serene lakes in the southwest, at length revealed to us, which have so long been reflecting our own sky in their bosom.

The great plain of India lies as in a cup between the Himmaleh and the ocean on the north and south, and the Brahmapootra and Indus, on the east and west, wherein the primeval race was received.  We will not dispute the story.  We are pleased to read in the natural history of the country, of the “pine, larch, spruce, and silver fir,” which cover the southern face of the Himmaleh range; of the “gooseberry, raspberry, strawberry,” which from an imminent temperate zone overlook the torrid plains.  So did this active modern life have even then a foothold and lurking-place in the midst of the stateliness and contemplativeness of those Eastern plains.  In another era the “lily of the valley, cowslip, dandelion,” were to work their way down into the plain, and bloom in a level zone of their own reaching round the earth.  Already has the era of the temperate zone arrived, the era of the pine and the oak, for the palm and the banian do not supply the wants of this age.  The lichens on the summits of the rocks will perchance find their level erelong.