Page:Scenes in my Native Land.pdf/44

40 trees, mingled among precipitous rocks, were covered, from their roots, high above the intersection of their branches, with carved names, lover's knots, and various devices. But they have fallen, those overshadowing trees, which were to us, as the oak of Delphos. Utilitarian zeal touched them, and they perished. The same magic and ministry, have converted the dreaming-place of the lone enthusiast into a busy manufacturing village, with its fitting appendages.

Still it is not as historians, as geographers or geologists, that we return to the clime of our nativity. We bring no plummet to sound its streams, no instrument for the admeasurement of its mountains. We saw, and formed our opinion of them, when opening life was a romance, when judgment had not known the discipline of contrast, or comparison, and when there was no experience. Then, every brooklet was to us as the Rhine, every violet-bank a Lausanne, every wooded hillock an Appenine.

Even after the lapse of many years, when we estimate other landscapes accurately, we continue to judge of these, by their associations. We revisit them, and though we are ourselves changed, though the voices that used to welcome us, are silent forever, yet the cliff, and the rivulet are still there, to soothe us with a perpetual friendship. We inhale from them the same fresh spirit that breathed there when life was new, and uplifted by its influence, exultingly confute the position of the philosopher, that "there is ever some dead fly in our box, marring the precious ointment."