A SUMMER'S DAY. 349 



beneath the weight of an unguarded heifer, which may thus 

 find itself in an awkward predicament, and which will have 

 to be rescued amidst much shouting and bawling of Hodges, 

 old and young, who have been summoned to its assistance. 

 Thus do the greater streams of our world wear and erode the 

 land year by year ; and you have here illustrated to you, in 

 the river-bank, a great geological truth, that of the erosion 

 of the land by rivers, and of the transportation of the matter 

 of our earth to the sea by the streams. The matter torn 

 from yonder bank, long ere this, may have made the circuit 

 of the sea-bed, and particles of mud torn from the spot 

 whereon we sit, and swept to the Thames, and thence to the 

 sea, may have mingled with countless other samples of 

 soil gathered from every land and deposited in the ocean- 

 bed to form the foundations of the worlds to come. No 

 wonder, then, that the meadows around us are so green, since 

 our stream so bountifully laves them in winter, and even in 

 summer loads them with favours of very beneficial kind. 



Peer we into the depths of the stream, and try to discern 

 if life in any shape be represented therein. Fresh from the 

 " Life of Thoreau," * the man who in Walden Wood made 

 friends with squirrels and racoons and snakes, and who, like 

 St. Francis d'Assisi, even made friends with the fishes, one 

 can realise, sitting in the calm of retirement, something of 

 that " nature-instinct " which so largely imbued Thoreau's 

 whole nature, and enabled him to carry into practical life the 



Wordsworthian idea of 



' ' the man 



Who, in this spirit, communes with the forms 

 Of Nature." 



A quiet day in a forest, by a river, or by the sea, spent in 

 conclave with the nature-voices around, is no bad medicine 

 for a wearied mind or saddened heart and brain. We are 

 spoken to in such places by a something " not ourselves," 

 and this something draws out of us the best and purest part 



* "Thoreau: his Life and Aims. A Study." By H. A. Page. 

 Chatto and Windus. 



