THE COUNTRY LIFE. 267 



gliding along the surface of the grass, it is 

 mine. These are the only hours that are not 

 wasted these hours that absorb the soul and 

 fill it with beauty. This is real life, and all 

 else is illusion, or mere endurance. Does this 

 reverie of flowers and waterfall and song form 

 an ideal, a human ideal, in the mind ? It 

 does ; much the same ideal that Phidias sculp- 

 tured of man and woman filled with a godlike 

 sense of the violet fields of Greece, beautiful 

 beyond thought, calm as my turtle-dove before 

 the lurid lightning of the unknown. To be 

 beautiful and to be calm, without mental fear, 

 is the ideal of nature. If I cannot achieve it, 

 at least I can think it." 



May we not say indeed, that never any man 

 has heretofore spoken of Nature as this man 

 speaks ? He has given new colours to the 

 field and hedge ; he has filled them with a 

 beauty which we never thought to find there ; 

 he has shown in them more riches, more 

 variety, more fulness, more wisdom, more 

 Divine order than we common men ever looked 

 for or dreamed of. He has taught us to look 



