glory in my evergreens. What winter-garden can compare for them with
mine? True, I have but four kinds--Scotch fir, holly, furze, and the
heath; and by way of relief to them, only brows of brown fern, sheets
of yellow bog-grass, and here and there a leafless birch, whose
purple tresses are even more lovely to my eye than those fragrant
green ones which she puts on in spring. Well: in painting as in
music, what effects are more grand than those produced by the
scientific combination, in endless new variety, of a few simple
elements? Enough for me is the one purple birch; the bright hollies
round its stem sparkling with scarlet beads; the furze-patch, rich
with its lacework of interwoven light and shade, tipped here and
there with a golden bud; the deep soft heather carpet, which invites
you to lie down and dream for hours; and behind all, the wall of red
fir-stems, and the dark fir-roof with its jagged edges a mile long,
against the soft grey sky.

An ugly, straight-edged, monotonous fir-plantation? Well, I like it,
outside and inside. I need no saw-edge of mountain peaks to stir up
my imagination with the sense of the sublime, while I can watch the
saw-edge of those fir peaks against the red sunset. They are my
Alps; little ones it may be: but after all, as I asked before, what
is size? A phantom of our brain; an optical delusion. Grandeur, if
you will consider wisely, consists in form, and not in size: and to
the eye of the philosopher, the curve drawn on a paper two inches
long, is just as magnificent, just as symbolic of divine mysteries
and melodies, as when embodied in the span of some cathedral roof.
Have you eyes to see? Then lie down on the grass, and look near
enough to see something more of what is to be seen; and you will find
tropic jungles in every square foot of turf; mountain cliffs and
debacles at the mouth of every rabbit burrow: dark strids,