in Scott, Byron, Wilson, Croly, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge; or
he can from some mighty Ben look abroad over a country--Scotland, and
the sea below, the blue heaven above, till, in his enthusiasm, he might
deem that he could lay his one hand on the mane of the ocean, and his
other on the tresses of the sun, and feels for the first time the force
of Beattie's own fine words--

"All the dread magnificence of Heaven."


Again, scenery will help sometimes to settle a question with a young
mind, whose intellectual and imaginative faculties are nearly equal,
whether it shall turn permanently to philosophy or to poetry. Such
dilemmas or Hercules choices are not uncommon; and there is a period in
life when the sight of a mountain, or a sunset, or an autumn river, amid
its yellow woods, can have more power than even a book, or the influence
of an older mind, or a young love-passion, in deciding them. Again,
early intimacy with fine scenery furnishes the poetic mind with an
exhaustless supply of images. These being sown in youth, sown broadcast,
and without any effort of the mind to receive or retain them, bear fruit
for ever. It is a shower of morning manna, which no after fervours of
noon, or chills of evening, are able to melt or freeze. Or, shall we say
the mind of the young, especially if gifted, is a daguerreotype plate of
the finest construction, and when surrounded by romantic or lovely
scenes, it receives and preserves them to the last, and can reproduce
them, too, in ever-varying forms, and perpetual succession? And hence,
in fine, it follows, that the greatest poets have either been brought up
in the country, or have early come in contact with a beautiful nature,
as the names of Homer, Virgil, Shakspeare, Milton, Thomson, Burns,
Scott, Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Wilson, and Thomas Aird, abundantly