PREFACE.

THERE is a time when the soft, dreamlike glory of our being is to be foregone, and those scenes of exquisite beauty, and those hymns of mellowed sweetness which thrilled us in the world of intellectual loveliness, are to be forgotten in the renewed energies of the spirit, and the deeper feelings of the heart. And ere we pass these enchanting memories by, we cannot choose but linger for awhile over the names and histories of those whose divine harmonies have thus given a more significant meaning to the ever-blessing creation around.

We have to thank poet and painter, and architect and sculptor. We have oftentimes, indeed, thought we could discern the golden light of heaven radiating and beautifying their works; and sometimes, too, have caught notes of a higher import than they at first expressed. There has been a strange beauty, as if the fairest gleam had fallen from the better land. And they

have taught us to look on nature as a precious thing; as the embodyment of the Divine idea; as the symbol of the Everlasting One.

Their names are gathered up in the following volume, either by allusion or by direct criticism. But there are two we would fain speak of here-the magnificent Trench, and the colossal Carlyle; one of whom reminds us of some gigantic river, now winding its course gently from its limpid spring through sunny meadows covered with the luxuriance of summer, and now sweeping in its more majestic course by the eternal bases of towering mountains, snow-diademed; now baring its bosom to the boundless heavens, and reflecting in its roll of rushing waters the myriad stars, and now heaving, and swelling, and surging onwards to the desolate ocean; sometimes dark and dim with pines and firs, and sometimes bright with the light of the blue empyrean: the other, of some tremendous being struggling with mighty power, now standing amid thick darkness, and now beneath the sublime radiance of universal sunlight; now gazing on the soft witchery of an evening twilight, and now piercing into the blackest scenes of the French Revolution; now immersed in loftiest speculations, and now sparkling and beaming with a world's regeneration. A spirit thanks them both-throbs out its fervid gratitude!