I 9 6 THE OLIVE LEAF. CHAP. 



the successful candidate upon a man when he is eighty 

 years old, although he has failed in all his previous 

 examinations. 



The love of nature is a sentiment in which we carry 

 our youth along with us through all the dreary wastes of 

 middle age, and it revives with peculiar force at the 

 close of life. Sated with the possessions and experiences 

 of life, we come back in the end of our days with the 

 old freshness of feeling to the simple familiar objects 

 that once formed all our joy. The gold of the vernal 

 crocus yields us more wealth of pleasure than all the gold 

 of the banks that we have accumulated : and the purple 

 bloom of its autumn relation is more precious than all 

 the purple and fine linen in which we have succeeded 

 in clothing ourselves. The heart never grows really old 

 if it brings with it from childhood a lively interest in the 

 varied objects of nature. These objects soothe and 

 ennoble, not by their own intrinsic charms only, but by 

 their immediate connection with that spiritual world 

 whose outward and visible representatives they are ; that 

 world which is ever near to us, but especially so in the 

 solitudes of nature where we are face to face with the 

 unsullied works of God. That world never grows old, 

 and the objects of nature which reveal it to our senses 

 are permanently young. The foliage that springs from 

 an old withered tree, for instance, is as perfect as that 

 which grew on its first shoot ; the grass grows as green 

 now as a thousand years ago ; the streams are as fresh 

 and the sunshine as bright. And therefore the heart 

 that communes with the spiritual through the medium 



