70 Summer 



in vain to conjure your familiars away. Ambition, 

 intrigue, passion, the sorrowful counterfeits of pleasure 

 are wicked necromancers who blur the picture by 

 their black and magical arts, and so poison your 

 senses that Mayfair, or Fleet Street, or the Stock 

 Exchange shall seem to take its place. Yet if you 

 but knew it, each fleeting minute would fain lay its 

 little load of joy at your feet, and no scheming may 

 ensure that the minutes of to-morrow will be so laden. 

 Every sound proclaims that the life around and about 

 you is utterly absorbed in the enjoyment of being. 

 The cuckoo shouts it as he flies ; the ringdove 

 murmurs it from his perch among the twinkling beech 

 leaves ; from a million throats up in the clouds and 

 down on the briar bush the burden is poured. Creation 

 is at flood. The swallows skimming low over the corn- 

 fields, the leverets whose silky ears just top the green 

 young stalks, the landrail croaking from the nettles, 

 the tiny water-voles out on the willow twigs where 

 they lean across the water whatever lives and moves 

 is happy now or will never be happy at all. 



So, too, is he who loves nature for herself alone ; 

 who with no call to study or observe, innocent of any 

 ambition to turn his pleasure into text-books, is con- 

 tent to lounge, and saunter, and dream in sunshine and 

 shadow, watching the grass grow and hearing the 

 birds sing. Where the rivulet has fretted a channel 

 between two breaks of wheat is a stone, over-arched 

 with yellow broom, and there, at highest noon, secluded 



