discover the source of it. On looking up, I
perceived that I stood under the branches of an old
gnarled walnut-tree, with a curious hollow trunk
fantastically twisted and wrinkled, and staggering
under the weight of its branches, from which
this penetrating odour proceeded.

Some little way beyond this tree the narrow
landscape (bounded elsewhere by the green shore
of the rippling woodland) was shut in by a huge
heap of tumbled stones and splinters of rock,
overgrown with dangling desiduous wild flowers,
and looking like ruins dropped there by chance
from some abolished planet long ago. For our
land is not a mountain land, and they seemed
to have got there from nowhere on earth. Over
these slabs and blocks a little rivulet came
leaping down, full of haste and importance. But
in the course of the untold ages which its little
life had outlived, the water had hollowed out for
itself in the stony channel underneath a smooth
deep basin; and there it fell asleep, and forgot
its hasty trouble of the moment before, or only
moved slowly round and round in sleepy objectless
circles—a lustrous darkness danced over by
the innumerable midge. I wandered on, and, by
the shore of this diminutive lake, lay down on
the dry grasses and watched the listless water
with listless eyes. Can you remember having
ever (when, perhaps, you were a child) so pored
and brooded over some little puddle blown by the
breeze in a windy field, or some tiny tarn of
black rain droppings stagnant in the hollow trunk
of a rotten tree, that at length, by that mysterious
power of suggestion with which everything
in nature is imbued, it has begun to assume
vast proportion and spacious significance,
transporting you to the shores of the Infinite, and
amazing you with the depths of a profound
tranquillity or the endless rolling of irrevocable
waves? I cannot explain, I cannot well
describe this sensation. There seemed to bask
before me, as I gazed with half-shut eyes, a fairy
lake, forlorn in Elfland, with enchanted shores.
The little larvae that haunt about such waters
were forming fast in busy clusters, and through
the limpid depths I could clearly see them moving
to the sunny surface, and budding into being.
All the process of a marvellous birth passed in a
moment under my eye, I watched with amazement
and delight one of these tiny creatures
unsheath her little wings from the tender crysalis,
unwrap the swathed damp sails of delicate
gauze, and dry in the warm sun the fragile
apparatus of her first fine voyage. Then, with a
tiny shudder of intense enjoyment, this minim
of nature launched her heedless life into the
buoyant and boundless blue. Transported with
admiration, "Bright image," I exclaimed, "teach
me, if I cannot share, at least to revere, the
perfect confidence of thy tiny being in the
measureless beneficence of nature!"

Hardly had these words escaped me, when I
felt upon my hand, which lay listless in the
sunny grass, a sharp and smarting sense of
sudden and acute irritation. I turned round
angry and surprised. I was stung. The little
creature which I had just been admiring had
settled on my hand, and was making her first
meal on my flesh and blood. "Ah, fool!" I
muttered, as I crushed the offender, and
extinguished in an instant its offensive existence—
"I am rightly served, whose preposterous fancy
invested with a spiritual beauty this bloodthirsty
insect. So it is with us, and so it is with you,
frivolous and ephemeral parasites of the beam,
beings of a baser appetite and a lower life than
ours, fair only because you are so fragile, we dream
of you, and love you in our dreams, till you wake
our folly with the sting which it deserves!"

Perhaps I unconsciously uttered these words
aloud. I cannot be sure of this, but I am sure
that, to my unspeakable surprise, they elicited
in reply an immoderate peal of laughter. " Ha!
ha!" cried a voice behind me, "truly this is a
superfine philosopher, that would embrace the
infinite, yet cannot bear the bite of a gnat!"

I turned round with an indignation, which was
increased by my extreme surprise at this sudden
and insulting ejaculation; but I failed to
discover any intruder by whom the words could
have been uttered. The solitude was unbroken.
There was not the trace of a footstep on
the grass, nor the glimpse of a face through
the trees. I was alone. " Fancy again!"
I thought; and, angry with myself, I relapsed
into reflections which were far from soothing.
"Alas!" I mused, " why should we, finite and
impotent creatures, so ardently cling to the
mockery of this terrible idea—the Infinite?
Embrace it! who can? Nature for ever escapes
us. We are forbidden to approach her. To
obtain the merest insight into the least of her
laws exhausts the lifetime of man." I thought
of my lamented friend the late Professor
Staubenschnabel. In the ardour of early youth he
wished, as he once told me, " to know something
of nature." He began with botany, this being,
he was informed, the easiest and best assured of
the natural sciences. He attended with assiduity
and enthusiasm the botanical lectures. By the
time he had mastered the classification of
Linnaeus, he was invited to forget all he had learned
and begin over again, since the French botanists
had invented a better system of classification.
This also he mastered, and was finally told off
to the section of the Cryptogamia. He had
fully exhausted this branch of botany soon after
he arrived at middle age. Somewhere about this
time, my poor friend's ill luck would have it that
the botanical archivist one day asked him to
catalogue a valuable collection of dried plants
which had lately been sent from the Himalayas.
In the course of this occupation, Herr
Staubenschnabel's attention was attracted by a particular
species of gnaphalium, unlike any yet known in
Europe. Being more conscientious than prudent,
he published an interesting work upon this
specimen, which created much sensation, and was
immediately replied to by three other interesting
works from the pen of three hostile professors.