become beautiful. The model farm, the most luxurious house, have their
regions of unsightliness; but the fine chemistry of Nature is constantly
clearing away all its impurities before our eyes, and yet so delicately
that we never suspect the process. The most exquisite work of literary
art exhibits a certain crudeness and coarseness, when we turn to it from
Nature,--as the smallest cambric needle appears rough and jagged,
when compared through the magnifier with the tapering fineness of the
insect's sting.

Once separated from Nature, literature recedes into metaphysics, or
dwindles into novels. How ignoble seems the current material of London
literary life, for instance, compared with the noble simplicity which, a
half-century ago, made the Lake Country an enchanted land forever! Is
it worth a voyage to England to sup with Thackeray in the Pot Tavern?
Compare the "enormity of pleasure" which De Quincey says Wordsworth
derived from the simplest natural object with the serious protest of
Wilkie Collins against the affectation of caring about Nature at all.
"Is it not strange", says this most unhappy man, "to see how little real
hold the objects of the natural world amidst which we live can gain on
our hearts and minds? We go to Nature for comfort in joy and sympathy
in trouble, only in books.... What share have the attractions of Nature
ever had in the pleasurable or painful interests and emotions of
ourselves or our friends?... There is surely a reason for this want of
inborn sympathy between the creature and the creation around it."

Leslie says of "the most original landscape-painter he knew," meaning
Constable, that, whenever he sat down in the fields to sketch, he
endeavored to forget that he had ever seen a picture. In literature this
is easy, the descriptions are so few and so faint. When Wordsworth was
fourteen, he stopped one day by the wayside to observe the dark outline