“I have been admiring the scene for the last half hour,” I said; “Shakspeare speaks of a music that cannot be heard, and I have not yet seen a place where one might better learn to comment on the passage.”
Both the thought and the phrase seemed new to him.
“A music that cannot be heard!” he repeated; and then, after a momentary pause, “you allude to the fact,” he continued, “that sweet music, and forms such as these, of silent beauty and grandeur, awaken in the mind emotions of nearly the same class. There is something truly exquisite in the concert of to-night.”
I muttered a simple assent.
“See,” he continued, “how finely these insulated piles of rock, that rise in so many combinations of form along the beach, break and diversify the red light, and how the glossy leaves of the ivy glisten in the hollows of the precipices above! And then, how the sea spreads away to the far horizon, a glorious pavement of crimson and gold!—and how the dark Ailsa rises in the midst, like the little cloud seen by the prophet! The mind seems to enlarge, the heart to expand, in the contemplation of so much of beauty and grandeur. The soul asserts its due supremacy. And, oh! ’tis surely well that we can escape from those little cares of life which fetter down our thoughts, our hopes, our wishes, to the wants and the enjoyments of our animal existence; and that, amid the grand and the sublime of nature, we may learn from the spirit within us that we are better than the beasts that perish!”
I looked up to the animated countenance and flashing eyes of my companion, and wondered what sort of a peasant it was I had met with. “Wild and beautiful as the scene is,” I said, “you will find, even among those who arrogate to themselves the praise of wisdom and learning, men who regard such scenes as mere errors of nature. Burnet would have told you that a Dutch landscape, without hill, rock, or valley, must be the perfection of beauty, seeing that Paradise itself could have furnished nothing better.”
“I hold Milton as higher authority on the subject,” said my companion, “than all the philosophers who ever wrote. Beauty, in a tame unvaried flat, where a man would know his country only by the milestones! A very Dutch Paradise, truly!”
“But would not some of your companions above,” I asked, “deem the scene as much an error of nature as Burnet himself? They could pass over these stubborn rocks neither plough nor harrow.”
“True,” he replied; “there is a species of small wisdom in the world that often constitutes the extremest of its folly; a wisdom that would change the entire nature of good, had it but the power, by vainly endeavouring to render that good universal. It would convert the entire earth into one vast corn field, and then find that it had ruined the species by its improvement.”
“We of Scotland can hardly be ruined in that way for an age to come,” I said. “But I am not sure that I understand you. Alter the very nature of good in the attempt to render it universal! How?”