so that we could now see them to some purpose. At night the moon was
clear, and, for the first time, from, the upper deck I saw one of the
great steamboats come majestically up. It was glowing with lights,
looking many-eyed and sagacious; in its heavy motion it seemed a
dowager queen, and this motion, with its solemn pulse, and determined
sweep, becomes these smooth waters, especially at night, as much as
the dip of the sail-ship the long billows of the ocean.

But it was not so soon that I learned to appreciate the lake scenery;
it was only after a daily and careless familiarity that I entered into
its beauty, for Nature always refuses to be seen by being stared at.
Like Bonaparte, she discharges her face of all expression when she
catches the eye of impertinent curiosity fixed on her. But he who has
gone to sleep in childish ease on her lap, or leaned an aching brow
upon her breast, seeking there comfort with full trust as from a
mother, will see all a mother's beauty in the look she bends upon him.
Later, I felt that I had really seen these regions, and shall speak of
them again.

In the afternoon we went on shore at the Manitou Islands, where the
boat stops to wood. No one lives here except wood-cutters for the
steamboats. I had thought of such a position, from its mixture of
profound solitude with service to the great world, as possessing an
ideal beauty. I think so still, even after seeing the wood-cutters and
their slovenly huts.

In times of slower growth, man did not enter a situation without a
certain preparation or adaptedness to it. He drew from it, if not to
the poetical extent, at least in some proportion, its moral and its
meaning. The wood-cutter did not cut down so many trees a day, that