These illustrations of the importance of uniting moral with physical ideas, in regard to vision, landscape, painting and music, are as true, as they are eloquent and striking. Who has not had the vivid remembrance of home recalled in a distant land, by a tree, a feature in the landscape, a blue hill in the distance! How readily the shadowy images of memory are evoked! Every one is acquainted with the touching circumstance in the character of the Swiss soldiers serving in foreign countries. Great numbers of them used to serve, as stipendaries, in the French armies. It was forbidden to play, in their presence, the air _Ranz des vaches_. Homesickness and desertion scarcely failed to ensue from hearing it. The wild and plaintive air reminded them of ‘Sweet home,’ their mountains, their simple pleasures, and the range and lowing of their kine. The beautiful Scotch airs derive their charm from their association with mountain scenery, and the peculiar history and manners of a highly sensitive, intelligent and national people. The same may be said of the unrivalled _Erin go Bragh_, in relation to the Irish; in a word of the national music of every people. Associate any idea with sentiment and the heart, and it becomes touching, and sublime, and capable of stirring the deepest fountains of feeling, according to the remembrance with which it is allied.
I have heard persons, endowed with keen feelings, repiningly contrast the miseries which they endured from an excess of irritable and unregulated sensibility, with the apparently joyous apathy of fat and fortunate burghers, who seem to find no sorrows and no troubles in life, and who hear with incredulity and, in fact, with an entire want of comprehension, about sufferings resulting from witnessing misery, which we have no means of relieving, and the sorrows, from innumerable sources, to which those of a keenly sensitive nature are subject. I have never seen these contrasts of character in this light. I unhesitatingly believe that a righteous Providence has exactly and admirably adjusted the weights in either scale. The great mass, who are not disturbed with excess of feeling, are, from the same temperament, interdicted from a whole universe of enjoyments, into which those, who possess sensibility, and regulate it aright, have free access.