"The love of nature is ever returned double to us, not only the delighter in our delight, but by linking our sweetest, but of themselves perishable feelings to distinct and vivid images, which we ourselves, at times, and which a thousand casual recollections, recall to our memory. She is the preserver, the treasurer of our joys. Even in sickness and nervous disease, she has peopled our imagination with lovely forms which have sometimes overpowered the inward pain and brought with them their old sensations.
And even when all men have seemed to desert us, and the friend of our heart has passed on, with one glance from his 'cold, disliking eye' – yet even then the blue heaven spreads it out and bends over us, and the little tree still shelters us under is plumage as a second cope, a domestic firmament, and the low-creeping gale will sigh in the heath plant and sooth us by sound of sympathy till the lulled grief lose itself in the fixed gaze on the purple heath-blossom, till the present beauty becomes a vision of memory."
- Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)
All images © 2006 Mike McDowell