It is something to know when you are addressed by Divinity and not by a common traveller. I went down cellar just now to get an armful of wood and, passing the brick piers with my wood and candle, I heard, methought, a commonplace suggestion, but when, as it were by accident, I reverently attended to the hint, I found that it was the voice of a god who had followed me down cellar to speak to me. How many communications may we not lose through inattention! I would fain keep a journal which should contain those thoughts and impressions which I am most liable to forget that I have had; which would have in one sense the greatest remoteness, in another, the greatest nearness to me. ’T is healthy to be sick sometimes. * * * * * I do not know but the reason why I love some Latin verses more than whole English poems is simply in the elegant terseness and conciseness of the language, an advantage which the individual appears to have shared with his nation. * * * * * When we can no longer ramble in the fields of nature, we ramble in the fields of thought and literature. The old become readers. Our heads retain their strength when our legs have become weak. English literature from the days of the minstrels to the Lake Poets, Chaucer and Spenser and Shakspeare and Milton included, breathes no quite fresh and, in this sense, wild strain. It is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and Rome. Her wilderness is a greenwood, her wild man a Robin Hood. There is plenty of genial love of nature in her poets, but [not so much of nature herself.] Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct.[118] There was need of America. I cannot think of any poetry which adequately expresses this yearning for the Wild, the _wilde_.[119] * * * * * Ovid says:— Nilus in extremum fugit perterritus orbem, Occuluitque caput, quod adhuc latet. (Nilus, terrified, fled to the extremity of the globe, And hid his head, which is still concealed.) And we moderns must repeat, “_Quod adhuc latet_.” Phaëton’s epitaph:— Hic situs est Phaëton, currûs auriga paterni; Quem si non tenuit, magnis tamen excidit ausis. His sister Lampetie _subitâ radice retenta est_. All the sisters were changed to trees while they were in vain beseeching their mother not to break their branches. _Cortex in verba novissima venit._ His brother Cycnus, lamenting the death of Phaëton killed by Jove’s lightning, and the metamorphosis of his sisters, was changed into a swan,— nec se coeloque, Jovique Credit, ut injustè missi memor ignis ab illo. (Nor trusts himself to the heavens Nor to Jove, as if remembering the fire unjustly sent by him), _i. e._ against Phaëton. (Reason why the swan does not fly.)