“At the top of a mountain encircled by higher mountains at a distance, we were passing without notice a heap of scattered stones, round which was a belt of green grass—green, and as it seemed rich—where all else was either poor heather or coarse grass, or unprofitable rushes and spongy moss. The Highlander made a pause, saying, ‘This place is much changed since I was here twenty years ago.’ He told us that the heap of stones had been a hut, where a family was then living, who had their winter habitation in the valley, and brought their goats thither in the summer to feed on the mountains, and that they were used to gather them together at night and morning to be milked close to the door, which was the reason why the grass was yet so green near the stones. It was affecting in that solitude to meet with this memorial of manners passed away. We looked about for some other traces of humanity, but nothing else could we find in that place.” Again: “We came to several deserted mountain huts or shiels, and rested for some time beside one of them, upon a hillock of its green plot of monumental herbage. The spot of ground where we sat was even beautiful, the grass being uncommonly verdant, and of a remarkably soft and silky texture.” The poet, his sister tells, then felt how fitting a subject for poetry there was in those affecting “relics of human society found in that grand and solitary region.” IV. Another way in which poets and others deal with Nature is when the heart, under the stress of some strong emotion, colors all Nature with its own hues, sees all things in sympathy with its own mood, making “All melodies an echo of that voice, All colors a suffusion from that light.” This feeling has been expressed in a very natural way by Sir Walter Scott:— “Who says, that when the Poet dies Mute Nature mourns her worshiper, And celebrates his obsequies; Who says, tall cliff and cavern lone For the departed Bard make moan; That mountains weep in crystal rill; That flowers in tears of balm distill; Through his loved groves that breezes sigh, And oaks in deeper groans reply; And rivers teach their rushing wave To murmur dirges round his grave.” This view of Nature has been philosophically condensed into a single stanza of Coleridge’s ode on Dejection. He says, that in looking at the outward world “We receive but what we give, And in our life alone doth Nature live; Ours is the wedding garment, ours the shroud.” And then he goes on to say that if in Nature we would see “Aught of higher worth From the soul itself must issue forth A light, a glory, a fair luminous mist Enveloping the Earth. And from the soul itself must there be sent A sweet and potent voice, of its own birth, Of all sweet sounds the life and element.”