Blackwood's Edinburgh magazine, Vol. 76, No. 467, September 1854

Transcriber’s Note:
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EDINBURGH:
WILLIAM BLACKWOOD & SONS, 45 GEORGE STREET,
AND 37 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON;
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SOLD BY ALL THE BOOKSELLERS IN THE UNITED KINGDOM.
PRINTED BY WILLIAM BLACKWOOD AND SONS, EDINBURGH.
BLACKWOOD’S
EDINBURGH MAGAZINE.
Strong and many are the claims made upon us by our mother Earth; the love of locality—the charm and attraction which some one homely landscape possesses to us, surpassing all stranger beauties, is a remarkable feature in the human heart. We who are not ethereal creatures, but of a mixed and diverse nature—we who, when we look our clearest towards the skies, must still have our standing-ground of earth secure—it is strange what relations of personal love we enter into with the scenes of this lower sphere. How we delight to build our recollections upon some basis of reality—a place, a country, a local habitation—how the events of life, as we look back upon them, have grown into the well-remembered background of the places where they fell upon us;—here is some sunny garden or summer lane, beatified and canonised for ever with the flood of a great joy; and here are dim and silent places, rooms always shadowed and dark to us, whatever they may be to others, where distress or death came once, and since then dwells for evermore. As little as we can deprive ourselves of the human frame, can we divest our individual history of its graceful garment of place and scene. Such a thing happened, we say; but memory is no bare chronicler of facts and events, and as we say the words, the time starts up before us, with all its silent witnesses;—leaves that were shed years ago, trees cut down and gone, yet they live in our thoughts with the joy or the sorrow of which they were silent attendants. We have caught and appropriated these bits of still life—they are a part of our history, and belong to us for ever.