The presence of life is, indeed,
necessary to its beauty, but of life congenial with its character; and
that life is not congenial which thrusts presumptuously forward, amidst
the calmness of the universe, the confusion of its own petty interests
and groveling imaginations, and stands up with the insolence of a
moment, amid the majesty of all time, to build baby fortifications upon
the bones of the world, or to sweep the copse from the corrie, and the
shadow from the shore, that fools may risk, and gamblers gather, the
spoil of a thousand summers.
174. It should therefore be remembered by every proprietor of land in
hill country, that his possessions are the means of a peculiar
education, otherwise unattainable, to the artists, and in some degree to
the literary men, of his country; that, even in this limited point of
view, they are a national possession, but much more so when it is
remembered how many thousands are perpetually receiving from them, not
merely a transitory pleasure, but such thrilling perpetuity of pure
emotion, such lofty subject for scientific speculation, and such deep
lessons of natural religion, as only the work of a Deity can impress,
and only the spirit of an immortal can feel: they should remember that
the slightest deformity, the most contemptible excrescence, can injure
the effect of the noblest natural scenery, as a note of discord can
annihilate the expression of the purest harmony; that thus it is in the
power of worms to conceal, to destroy, or to violate, what angels could
not restore, create or consecrate; and that the right, which every man
unquestionably possesses, to be an ass, is extended only, in public, to
those who are innocent in idiotism, not to the more malicious clowns,
who thrust their degraded motley conspicuously forth amidst the fair
colors of earth, and mix their incoherent cries with the melodies of
eternity, break with their inane laugh upon the silence which Creation
keeps where Omnipotence passes most visibly, and scrabble over with the
characters of idiocy the pages that have been written by the finger of
God.
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