air becomes transparent and alive, and light streams forth, you know not whence, you would not feel that your eye were looking into the very eye of the Infinite?"

There is a strange fascination and mystical charm in the dawning of a new day; when the world is asleep, and sin and uncleanness, and sorrow and affliction seem, for the moment, to have lapsed into nothingness; when the first faint streaks gild the eastern horizon, and the light becomes redder and redder,—and then fades to saffron and gray, as fuller and fuller,

"Dawn like a mighty river comes rolling in."

The ecstasy produced by this ever recurring miracle of the dawn of day, has never been more passionately described than by William Blake. He was not, like Theòphile Gautier,

un homme pour qui le monde existe," but rather one who, according to his own words, did not behold the outward creation-one to whom it was indeed hindrance and not action. "What, it will be questioned, when the

sun rises do you not see a round disc of fire, something like a guinea? Oh, no, no! I see an innumerable company of the heavenly host -Holy, Holy, Holy, is the Lord God

crying :

Almighty.''

There are three phases of nature which have at all times been peculiar outlets into the spiritual world, the mountains, the sea, and the starry heavens. The vast expanse of the sea, with its power of giving clean emotion and of washing away all troubles of the soul in the pure ablution of its multitudinous waters; the sea, which is the

Purger of earth and medicine of men
Creating a sweet climate by its breath;

the sea, which does all this, is likewise capable

In its mathematic ebb and flow

of

Giving a hint of that which changes not.

Perhaps no one has better expressed the power of the sea to induce the sense of the Infinite

than Richard Jefferies, in his "Story of My Heart," already quoted. "There was a time when a weary restlessness came upon me. I was weary for the pure, fresh springs of thought. Some instinctive feeling uncontrollably drove me to the sea. To get to the sea at some quiet spot was my one thought. * * * The great sun shone above, the wide sea was before me, the wind came sweet and strong from the waves. The life of the earth and the sea, the glow of the sun filled me. I touched the surge with my hands, I lifted my face to the sun, I opened my lips to the wind. I prayed aloud in the roar of the waves. My soul was strong as the sea and prayed with the sea's might. 'Give me fulness of life, like to the sea and the sun and the earth and the air. Give me greatness and perfection of soul higher than all things. Give me my inexpressible desire which swells in me like a tide, give it to me with all the force of the sea!'"

But after all, it is probably the high mountains which have more than all other phases of

nature the power to induce the transcendental feeling. This is undoubtedly due to the fact that they not only give a sense of vastness in a lateral sense, by opening up to the eye distant landscapes and widening the horizon on all sides, but because they seem to lift the observer nearer to heaven, opening out to the uplifted eye the starry gulfs of infinite space. They have been made sacred by religion in all times. Yet in the past the inaccessible summits of the high mountains were looked upon with a feeling of awe and reverence, and oftentimes of fear, as the dwelling-place of supernatural beings. Even as late as 1865, Mr. Whymper found among the guides whom he wished to engage in his attempt to scale the Matterhorn, the religious shrinking from invading the mysterious haunts of spirits. Throughout the whole of the Middle Ages men looked with fear and trembling at the awful silence and ruggedness of the Alpine summits, and passed with shuddering horror from the plains of Italy to those of Switzerland. This feeling is well expressed by

Goethe in the beautiful song of Mignon, in "Wilhelm Meister's Lehrjahren: "

Kennst du den Berg und seinen Wolkensteg?
Das Maultier sucht im Nebel seinen Weg;
In Höhlen wohnt der Drachen alte Brut;
Es stürzt der Fels und über ihn die Flut.1

It is only in our own times that even the highest mountains have become the object of pleasure seeking tourists, as well as the chief phase of the transcendental love of nature.

But while this is true of the highest mountains, the lower hills have always been connected with the religious instinct. "I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills whence cometh my help," sang the Psalmist; Saint Francis of Assisi was filled with the desiderium collium æternorum, which led him from time to time to turn away from the busy haunts of men, to the quiet hermitage of La Verna; and it was the same mystical charm which made Petrarch

1 Knowest thou the mountain and its path amid the clouds ? The beast of burden seeks its way enwrapped with mists. The ancient brood of the dragons lurk in their hollow caves; Down crash the rocks and the torrents leap after.