OUT OF DOORS WITH NATURE. 
327 
early day : for with the influx of a rich commerce we may 
look for these foreign luxuries. 
But with all Jonathan's material tendencies in the matter of 
practical poetry and Epic deeds, he is nevertheless surrounded 
in his daily walks by marvellous harmonies, the etherial tones 
of which might 
" Wake a soul under the ribs of Death." 
As he has never been noted for a laggard, we give him the 
credit of greeting many a resurrection of Daedal Earth with 
*' The top o' the morn to ye !" 
as Day rolled grandly forth from its deep lair of Darkness ; 
and then how, in spring-time, axled on harmonies, its sono- 
rous wheels climbed the low mists, melting them in seeming 
snow-flakes, in rose-tints, and in music ! Ah, then it is that 
hard-fisted Jonathan knows that he is something more than 
a machine maker — ^that, though he invents, he too had been 
invented first ; and his rough heart melts — his brown and 
parchment-wrinkled face, grows glistening down its seams 
like "dew besprent" sides of gray old granite gorges which 
sudden summer storms have cut in sharp narrow tracks, as 
they were hurled adown from some element-defying mountain 
front ! He hears the morning song of birds, and all his child- 
hood is brought back to him — for tough, hard, and indestruc- 
tible as his present nature seems, it is not the less true that this 
caoutchouc being was once tender as the first fresh-blown 
flower of spring, when the earliest morning bird waked with 
it in soft, low, garrulous prattling to the coming sun. 
He recognizes, one by one, the fellows of that blissful time. 
First struggling out from the deep hush of dim and distant 
woods, he hears the mellow, liquid strain of that sweet- voiced 
Evangel of the solitude — the freckled Song Thrush. Then, 
nearer at hand, the little "Wren shrills its piping treble — aye, 
it may be from the very chimney-top itself — while now, some 
