Tell me, does the magnetic virtue of the needles of the compasses
of all those ships attract them thither?

Once more. Say you are in the country; in some high land of lakes.
Take almost any path you please, and ten to one it carries you
down in a dale, and leaves you there by a pool in the stream.
There is magic in it. Let the most absent-minded of men be
plunged in his deepest reveries--stand that man on his legs,
set his feet a-going, and he will infallibly lead you to water,
if water there be in all that region. Should you ever be athirst
in the great American desert, try this experiment, if your
caravan happen to be supplied with a metaphysical professor.
Yes, as every one knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever.

But here is an artist. He desires to paint you the dreamiest,
shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all
the valley of the Saco. What is the chief element he employs?
There stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit
and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there
sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke.
Deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping
spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. But though
the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down
its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd's head, yet all were vain,
unless the shepherd's eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him.
Go visit the Prairies in June, when for scores on scores of miles you
wade knee-deep among Tiger-lilies--what is the one charm wanting?--
Water there is not a drop of water there! Were Niagara but a
cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it?
Why did the poor poet of Tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls