If you want to see a new and peculiar beauty, watch a golden sunset through a grove draperied with gray moss. The swaying, filmy bands turn golden and rose-colored, and the long, swaying avenues are like a scene in fairy-land. * * * * * [Sidenote: The right side and the wrong.] Every place, like a bit of tapestry, has its right side and its wrong side; and both are true and real,—the wrong side with its rags and tags, and seams and knots, and thrums of worsted, and the right side with its pretty picture. SUNNY MEMORIES OF FOREIGN LANDS. [Sidenote: Beauty in nature.] “Turn off my eyes from beholding vanity,” says a good man, when he sees a display of graceful ornament. What, then, must he think of the Almighty Being, all whose useful work is so overlaid with ornament? There is not a fly’s leg, not an insect’s wing, which is not polished and decorated to an extent that we should think positive extravagance in finishing up a child’s dress. And can we suppose that this Being can take delight in dwellings and modes of life and forms of worship where everything is reduced to cold, naked utility? I think not. The instinct to adorn and beautify is from Him; it likens us to Him, and if rightly understood, instead of being a siren to beguile our hearts away, it will be the closest affiliating band. * * * * * [Sidenote: Flowers.] There is a strange, unsatisfying pleasure about flowers, which, like all earthly pleasures, is akin to pain. What can you do with them?—you want to do something, but what? Take them all up and carry them with you? You cannot do that. Get down and look at them? What, keep a whole caravan waiting for your observation? That will never do. Well, then, pick and carry them along with you. That is what, in despair of any better resource, I did.... It seemed almost sacrilegious to tear away such fanciful creations, that looked as if they were votive offerings on an altar, or, more likely, living existences, whose only conscious life was a continual exhalation of joy and praise. These flowers seemed to me to be the Earth’s raptures and aspirations,—her better moments—her lucid intervals. Like everything else in our existence, they are mysterious. In what mood of mind were they conceived by the great Artist? Of what feelings of His are they the expression,—springing up out of the dust, in the gigantic, waste, and desolate regions, where one would think the sense of His almightiness might overpower the soul? Born in the track of the glacier and the avalanche, they seem to say to us that this Almighty Being is very pitiful, and of tender compassion; that, in His infinite soul, there is an exquisite gentleness and love of the beautiful, and that, if we would be blessed, His will to bless is infinite. * * * * * [Sidenote: Mountain air.]