Strange that, with all our love of nature and of art, we never were a Painter. True that in boyhood we were no contemptible hand at a Lion or a Tiger--and sketches by us of such cats springing or preparing to spring in keelivine, dashed off some fifty or sixty years ago, might well make Edwin Landseer stare. Even yet we are a sort of Salvator Rosa at a savage scene, and our black-lead pencil heaps up confused shatterings of rocks, and flings a mountainous region into convulsions, as if an earthquake heaved, _in a way that is no canny_, making people shudder as if something had gone wrong with this planet of ours, and creation were falling back into chaos. But we love scenes of beautiful repose too profoundly ever to dream of "transferring them to canvass." Such employment would be felt by us to be desecration--though we look with delight on the work when done by others--the picture without the process--the product of genius without thought of its mortal instruments. We work in words, and words are, in good truth, images, feelings, thoughts; and of these the outer world, as well as the inner, is composed, let materialists say what they will. Prose is poetry--we have proved _that_ to the satisfaction of all mankind. Look! we beseech you--how a little Loch seems to rise up with its tall heronry--a central isle--and all its sylvan braes, till it lies almost on a level with the floor of our Cave, from which in three minutes we could hobble on our crutch down the inclining greensward to the Bay of Waterlilies, and in that canoe be afloat among the Swans. All birches--not any other kind of tree--except a few pines, on whose tops the large nests repose--and here and there a still bird standing as if asleep. What a place for Roes!