It is also a mental tonic--even in homœopathic doses.--I took last Sunday a little four-mile stroll before breakfast, and its calming and beneficent influence is with me still. No one was about; I had the whole country to myself, and I bathed a tired head in the spacious quietude of earth and sky. From a height I looked over a great and restful country, across the sleeping town, and far away over the peaceful lake. Above it all stretched the benevolent heavens, brooding over this pendent world.--I thought I saw fixity in the midst of motion; substance beneath evanescence; unity in multiplicity; a sort of goal where everything was cyclical; an end where all things seemed only means; infinity lurking in finitude; a divine inhering in the human. After the treadmill of the week it was uplifting, exalting. I inhaled great draughts of air from ultra-planetary spaces; I fed on manna fallen from the highest heavens. This tiny planet, with its trivial cares and duties, vanished from my eyes, and I cooled my brow in the clouds of the holy of holies.--But none the less did I recognise the all-importance, to it and to me, of earth's small cares and duties. Were they not part of that infinite multiplicity in which lurked that infinite unity? Did they not go to make up the "spiritual economy"[57] of the cosmos? But I saw them in a newer light--a larger light than merely solar, and they took on a new aspect, and declared themselves integral portions of that divine All without which that divine All would cease to be. There is something strangely pure and purifying about early morning air. It is Nature's great steriliser. It is aseptic; and none breathes it but is more or less cleansed of the taint of noontide life. The noxious germs of care and anxiety cannot live in it. It is a magnificent bactericide. Nature is herself then. Even the denizens of Nature seem to know this, for never is bird or beast more blithesome than at dawn. § 67 For lonely souls, for luckless souls, there is, perhaps, after all is said and done, but one source of solace. "Nothing human," said Eugénie de Guérin, "nothing human comforts the soul, nothing human supports it:-- 'À l'enfant il faut sa mère, À mon âme il faut mon Dieu.'"[58]