NATURE AND THE SUPERNATIURAL. T HE delightful essayist who writes in
the Cornhill under the heading "From a College Window" deals in the current number of that magazine with certain instantaneous perceptions of natural beauty which have come to him from time to time. "I was visited," we read, "as I sate in my room to-day, by one of those sudden impres- sions of rare beauty that come and go like flashes." The materials of the impression were these : a plot of grass, an old wall, the windowed side of a College Hall, and a sudden burst of sunshine,—a familiar scene upon which the writer had constantly looked, but the charm of which he had never before perceived to the full. Some of those who read his words may —he thinks they will—say that it is an unreal or fantastic experience of which be speaks; but to him it is "one of the truest and commonest things of my life to be visited by this strange perception and appreciation of beauty." It comes irrespective of illness or health, of cheerfulness or sadness, of leisure or work "When it is with me, nothing can banish it;
extremity of sorrow or gloom can suspend it. I have stood beside the grave of one I loved, with the shadow of urgent business, of hard detailed arrangements of a practical kind,'
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