Autumn Gleanings Or Ears of Barley Author:John Anderson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: IV. LOCH ARCHAIC; OR, HIDDEN BEAUTIES. " A THING of beauty is a joy for ever." So sang the ill-used and hapless John Keats—and in so singing his heart gave ut... more »terance to a lovely truth, which will long outlive the indiscriminating and unappreciative article of the Quarterly, which helped to send the poet to an early grave. That article was worthy to rank with its misguided brother of the Edinburgh Review, which opened its battery upon the great Wordsworth in these undis- cerning words, " This will never do!" Yes, the beautiful things of nature, dropped from the hand of God, are sources of never-failing joy to all well-attuned souls, and never more so than when they burst upon us suddenly, as we wander among the hills, the valleys, and the streams. Flowers are lovely in themselves, but there is something in their setting by the Creative Hand that imparts to those nurslings of nature a special loveliness. We welcome the sweet primrose and the pensile anemone wherever they may greet our gaze, but they never seem half so beautiful as when in our evening walk by mead and brooklet we discover them in their native retreats, the one peeping shyly from the shelter of the mossy stone or hoary tree-root, the other sprinkling the dale of the yellow oak coppice, and starring the dewy turf with its delicate blossoms. Nature is fond of surprises, the rowan tree hanging its coral berries from the rifted cliff—and behind the grey bouWer, in the cleftof the beetling crag, or round the sudden bend of the dimpling burn we own to a " glad surprise" when we are accosted by our favourite flowers—each in the place expressly suited for it—and in a magic moment they waft us back to the dearly-cherished " days of auld lang syne," when we were rich in those simple joys which are among the best treasures of...« less