but here is an artist. he desires to paint you the dreamiest, shadiest, quietest, most enchanting bit of romantic landscape in all the valley of the saco. what is the chief element he employs? there stand his trees, each with a hollow trunk, as if a hermit and a crucifix were within; and here sleeps his meadow, and there sleep his cattle; and up from yonder cottage goes a sleepy smoke. deep into distant woodlands winds a mazy way, reaching to overlapping spurs of mountains bathed in their hill-side blue. but though the picture lies thus tranced, and though this pine-tree shakes down its sighs like leaves upon this shepherd’s head, yet all were vain, unless the shepherd’s eye were fixed upon the magic stream before him. go visit the prairies in june, when for scores on scores of miles you wade knee-deep among tiger-lilies—what is the one charm wanting?—water—there is not a drop of water there! were niagara but a cataract of sand, would you travel your thousand miles to see it? why did the poor poet of tennessee, upon suddenly receiving two handfuls of silver, deliberate whether to buy him a coat, which he sadly needed, or invest his money in a pedestrian trip to rockaway beach? why is almost every robust healthy boy with a robust healthy soul in him, at some time or other crazy to go to sea?