114 OUTDOOR STUDIES 
edness with a joy the more? Yonder barefoot 
boy, as he drifts silently in his punt beneath 
the drooping branches of that vine-clad bank, 
has a bliss which no millionaire can buy with 
money, no statesman conquer with votes, — 
which yet is no monopoly of his, and to which 
time and experience only add a more subtile and 
conscious charm. The rich years were given 
us to increase, not to impair, these cheap felici- 
ties. Sad or sinful is the life of that man who 
finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more 
musical in maturity than childhood. Time is a 
severe alembic of youthful joys, no doubt; we 
exhaust book after book, and leave Shakespeare 
unopened ; we grow fastidious in men and wo- 
men; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we fancy 
we have heard before; we have seen the pic- 
tures, we have listened to the symphonies: but 
what has been done by all the art and litera- 
ture of the world towards describing one sum- 
mer day? The most exhausting effort brings 
us no nearer to it than to the blue sky which 
is its dome; our words are shot up against it 
like arrows, and fall back helpless. Literary 
amateurs go the tour of the globe to renew 
their stock of materials, when they do not yet 
know a bird or a bee or a blossom beside their 
homestead door ; and in the hour of their great- 
est success they have not an horizon to their 
