This present Sunday I set off with the others to walk to church, but it was late; I could not keep up with the pedestrians, and, not to delay them, turned back. I wandered down the hill path to the river brink, and crossed the little bridge and strolled along, pensive yet with no definite or continuous subject of thought. How beautiful it was—how tranquil! not a cloud in the blue sky, not a breath of air! “And where the dead leaf fell there did it rest;” but so still it was that scarce a single leaf did flutter or fall, though the narrow pathway along the water’s edge was already encumbered with heaps of decaying foliage. Everywhere around, the autumnal tints prevailed, except in one sheltered place under the towering cliff, where a single tree, a magnificent lime, still flourished in summer luxuriance, with not a leaf turned or shed. I stood still opposite, looking on it quietly for a long time. It seemed to me a happy tree, so fresh and fair and grand, as if its guardian Dryad would not suffer it to be defaced. Then I turned, for close beside me sounded the soft, interrupted, half-suppressed warble of a bird, sitting on a leafless spray, which seemed to bend with its tiny weight. Some lines which I used to love in my childhood came into my mind, blending softly with the presences around me. “The little bird now to salute the morn Upon the naked branches sets her foot, The leaves still lying at the mossy root, And there a silly chirruping doth keep, As if she fain would sing, yet fain would weep; Praising fair summer that too soon is gone, And sad for winter, too soon coming on!” _Drayton._ The river, where I stood, taking an abrupt turn, ran wimpling by; not as I had seen it but a few days before,—rolling tumultuously, the dead leaves whirling in its eddies, swollen and turbid with the mountain torrents, making one think of the kelpies, the water wraiths, and such uncanny things,—but gentle, transparent, and flashing in the low sunlight; even the barberries, drooping with rich crimson clusters over the little pools near the bank, and reflected in them as in a mirror, I remember vividly as a part of the exquisite loveliness which seemed to melt into my life. For such moments we are grateful: we feel then what God _can_ do for us, and what man can not.—_Carolside, November 5th, 1843._ [Illustration] 71. “In the early ages of faith, the spirit of Christianity glided into and gave a new significance to the forms of heathenism. It was not the forms of heathenism which encrusted and overlaid the spirit of Christianity, for in that case the spirit would have burst through such extraneous formulæ, and set them aside at once and for ever.” [Illustration] 72.