Helen, however, was sad and dispirited, and felt that the tone of her brother's conversation altogether was painful and distressing. Some time had now elapsed since she had seen him; the effect of the country on her mind had been calm and refreshing; and all that was dark and bad, all that was weak and foolish in the character of her brother, seemed to stand out the more prominently from the state of her own mind. When we wish to see an object distinctly through a glass, we take care to wipe it clean from all specks and dust; and there is nothing that clears the mental vision so much of all the dark and dimming things of earthly life, as calm communion with the spirit of God's works in scenes where man's handy-work has wrought but little. CHAPTER XXX. In looking at one of the finest and most sunshiny pictures of Claude Lorrain, and in marking the calm and gentle brightness which his pictures generally display, it has often struck me that they afforded a fine image of happiness--of that pure dreamy happiness which is sometimes the portion of youth. The calm, refreshing shades in the foreground--shades produced not by clouds or by storms, or by the proximity of night, but by some sweet object softening the light, and mitigating the heat--the immense boundless distances, blending into the blue sky, Earth losing itself in Heaven--the prospect embracing every sort of object that can enchant the eye, fields, and plains, and hills, and woods, and villages, bridges, and streams, and lakes, in gay confusion, and ruined temples waking sweet associations of the past, and man's living habitations giving the idea of dear domestic peace, each catching the bright sunshine, and each beautiful, though vague--the poet-painter surely intended all this as the symbol of a happy dream, where present enjoyment is calm though full, and every object of desire and hope is stretched out before the future, and lighted by the sun of youth and fancy, till the remote end mingles with heaven itself. The three days that Morley Ernstein and Juliet Carr had passed at Sandgate, had been, like one of those pictures of Claude Lorrain, all brightness, all hope. There seemed not to be a cloud in the whole sky; but those sweet days of happiness are often like the glowing mornings of tropical climes, where, in the midst of a heaven previously without spot, a small, dark cloud appears, no bigger than a man's hand, and ere many hours are over, the hurricane sweeps past, and all is destruction, desolation, and sorrow.