Page:The Hunterian Oration for 1850.djvu/55

39 the beauty of form or colour, or from a succession of harmonious sounds, equally grateful to the ear, to the highest manifestations of refined and cultivated taste, possessed by the poet or the painter. Such objects, in some form or other, are brought home within the range of every man’s observation, but im an especial degree, does a country life furnish materials for the development of untutored thought and admiration of such objects of beauty and refinement, which are calculated to take a man out of the sphere of his personal occupations, and to direct his thoughts to the contemplation of objects that tend to calm, and at the same time to elevate his mind.

The sources of this knowledge, and the pleasure that it produces, are infinite; the whole universe is charged with the office of mstruction to the hitherto untaught mind— innumerable voices reach it from earth and heaven! It takes lessons from every object within the sphere of its senses, from the form of a rosebud to the profoundest beauty of ancient or modern art.

Who can behold the exquisite colours of the tulip, or the gorgeous drapery of a golden sunset, or even the variegated colours decomposed by the common prism, without a sensa- tion of pleasure? Whose eye is so dead to the beauty of form or outline as to betray indifference to the delicate tracery of mosses, of ferns, of heaths, or to the grandeur and no less varied outlines of the sturdy oak, the graceful sweep of the weeping willow, or the lighter pencilling of the ash— the beautiful undulations of distant hills, or the yet more sublime form of gigantic and ponderous-looking clouds, when viewed against the blue sky, or fringed with light reflected