10 



indicates the longing of our more spiritual being; which 

 recalls to the mind's eye of the wearied man the green 

 fields of his boyish days, and impresses him again and 

 again, — oh, not in vain ! — with the gentler and purer 

 emotions of his childhood. They come upon him, amidst 

 the dust and heat, and perhaps the wretchedness, of his 

 daily lot, like outward manifestations of the inner spirit- 

 world. They are the signals of thoughts 



Commercing with the skies. 



They are like gleams of a fairer and brighter sunshine, 

 from realms " beyond the visible diurnal sphere." 



The time does, indeed, come to all men, when they 

 would gladly escape from the crowd and confusion of 

 common life, and 



Forth issuing on a summer's morn, to breathe 

 Among the pleasant villages and farms, 



would forget the thronging cares which have exhausted 

 their hearts, in company with the lilies of the field^ that 

 toil not, neither do they spin. It is, indeed, by influences 

 such as these that we acquire not only fresher impulses to 

 duty, but far higher and nobler principles of action. Ex- 

 perience, it is true, teaches us that the mere drudgery of 

 rural pursuits can have little effect in raising the private 

 or social condition of the man. To turn the verdant soil 

 for the mere sustenance of life, would as little impress his 

 mind with the true sentiment of his occupation, as the 

 gloomy grandeur of ocean enters into the soul of the tem- 

 pest-tost and weather-worn mariner. The rustic laborer 

 might forever follow his plough upon the mountain side, 

 and trample with heedless foot upon the brightest flowers, 

 that appealed with dewy eyes in vain to his plodding 

 sensibilities ; and the village maiden, obeying those truer 

 and nobler instinctSj inseparable, I believe, from every 



