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Untitled Article
Dundee or Ossian ; but it is a beautiful little ravine , and looks the portal to scenery which the warrior should never tread , but which the poet were no poet not to seek . Yon fir grove hymns our entrance . Fragrant firs ; the beech and the fir in masses are
ever fragrant . But how varied is the music of trees . They are all iEolian harps , but differently strung and tuned . These sound a solemn anthem . They are the organ of the woods , and their cadence is deep , mellow , sustained , sometimes pealing forth with grand choral swell , and then subsiding into low but rich modulations . Was not such the worship of the lofty cedars , when of
old on Lebanon they praised the Lord ? The path goes winding on into the ravine , a new pair of contrasted pictures at every step , the wooded and the grassy bank , striving , in beauteous , harmonious rivalry . Here rest , on this rich , soft , elastic couch of cup-moss , and look down the declivity . What fairy magic has etherealized the dancing leaves of those large beech trees ? What
exquisitely delicate creatures of the element they seem , their tender green fluttering in the purest and most attenuated halo of light that ever mortal eye beheld . There is water below , though hidden from us here ; broad , placid , limpid water ; and the light of the setting sun is on it ; and the branches overhang it , and the water reflects up the mildradiance on those young , trembling ,
restless leaves . A trick of nature ; she delights to treat her loving children with all kinds of experiments on loveliness . Those who will see beauty she surrounds with superfluity of beauty . The sun is sinking lower , and our path is at the bottom of the ravine , by the water ' s edge . How fast the trees gloom ; their thick trunks
are dark ; they are black . But look up to the trees above—their trunks are burnished and radiant gold . Their foliage is glittering and blazing , like that of the magic garden of an oriental enchantress . And look across to the opposite side of the ravine . On the lofty brow of that smooth , grassy , gently shelving bank , the sun-light has
laid itself down , and sleeps and dreams , like Tennyson ' s lotos eater , and seems as it w ould rest and sleep eternally . Another change ; and no wonder , for this strange old building on the river has a cabalistic look ; the broad full stream , ( the infant Medway , is it not ? don't be sure ; I am not precise in my topographies and potamology ; the child may be a changeling ;) the broad full stream is
sunk down , down to the very bottom of two steep deep banks , and there it murmurs along , unseen ; as all things else are now unseen , for we are in a close alley of the darkest hollies , and large as they are dark , rustling their unchanging and spiky leaves in concord with the low but more living sound of the flowing
brooklet . It is unearthly music . This portion of the walk may be reckoned the region of northern superstition , as the last was of Arabian magic and fairyland , bordering , by its oriental character , on the locality of the Syrian and sacred chant that consecrated our entrance on these successive scenes of enchantment . And
Untitled Article
424 Local Logic .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), June 2, 1833, page 424, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct2616/page/64/
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