But it is the change of circumstances which often, more than aught else, prevents the comprehension and appreciation of a poet’s thoughts—his descriptive thoughts particularly. As much as descriptive poetry resembles painting, it comes far short of the power which the latter art exerts in representing scenes _as a whole_. Take a pastoral poem, by way of making my meaning understood. A poet would describe the parts and personages separately—such as the wood,—the stream,—the flocks, and the pastoral lovers—but the painter can present them all at once, as a single idea, so to speak. How difficult, then, must it be for an author so to describe scenes, the like of which the reader may never have beheld, as to be fully appreciated by all. If he is sketching,—as did Thompson,—the customs and scenes of rural life, he will be understood fully by those alone who have enjoyed such scenes and practised such customs. Those who, in this case, had viewed the _original_, would be able best to decide upon the merits of the picture. A poet might rhyme forever about scenes which he had never looked upon, but he would utterly fail to satisfy one familiar with the same, that his portraitures were correct. So a reader, who had never viewed a river, or a waterfall, or a gloomy ravine amid rock-ribbed mountains, would scarcely be able fully to appreciate a description of the same. He might, indeed form an idea of the reality—but it would be only _ideal_ after all. I have often thought of Byron’s exclamation in connection with the above train of reflections: “Oh! there is sweetness in the mountain’s air, Which bloated ease can never hope to share.” He was probably among the hills of Portugal at the time, and, doubtless, felt what he wrote. I never realized the force of the thought as I did one summer morning, while seated in a piazza, a half mile or so from the North Mountain, in my native Virginia, with a beautiful, green and flowery meadow intervening. Just as I came to the stanza of “Childe Harold,” from which I have quoted, a delightful mountain-breeze swept over the plain. As it tossed my locks to and fro, and gamboled with the leaves of the volume before me, I _felt_ indeed, that there was “sweetness in the mountain air.” Nothing could set forth that uncertainty of appreciation I have been dwelling upon, more clearly than such an incident. It is probable that the greatest city admirer of his lordship’s poetry, never noticed the full force of the idea which thus arrested my attention, but passed it unappreciated, in admiration of some sentiment, in the very same stanza, whose full import he could comprehend, while he entered into the feelings of the poetic traveller.