Year: 1876

early wheat, high enough already to be stirred
by the wind down by the creek where the
cows are gathered to sun themselves, the pol
lard willows wave thin green vapOr In the
air. overhead the birds are chatterinS and
flying with stolen straws to build their new
homes for the Summer mOtherly old hens go
about with their brOods hOckIng under their feet
Brindle passes you mild-eyed and cOmplacent,
her calf by her side; the red buds OF the
naples are uncurling; q myriad tiny yellow
gummy sheaths push their way to the light from
under the ridged garden mold. You are con-
scious of a vast stir and wallening about you,
shown in these trihing things, life wholly
different from your own, or that OF men, anu
which is in its own way powerful, clean, ana
chaste You leave the farm-lands, and go
down through the marshes to the sea. Inc
stir, the Weakening, is about you still. Mldges
begin to buzz and play over the safi1on-col-
ored water in the tide creeks; quite out of
sight under the brown pne-needles the pink
arbutus welcomes you with its delicious breath.
The ish-hawk, just home from the Southern
: coast, sits pcrched alone on the dead tree,
where she had her nest last Summer; even
the old wind-blown cedars show bright
red blood veins in their gray trunks
and put forth pale buds. The sand of the
beach is warm; the air moist; the sea, dark
violet or emerald or blue and full of bound
less life, rushes in to touch the earth at your
feet.


1t is this life which is the strange new fact
to you in your days journey out OF town.
You feel as if you had yourself discovered 1t;
how inexhaustible it is, how pure and how re-
gardless of you! You think (not at all con-
scous that you are thinking platitudes as old
as Job that this great process of leafing and
of growth would have gone on all the same,
whether you had died in that attack OF fever
last month or not; that oil over the world the
birds mate and the beasts bring forth their
young, and the earth renews herself in youth
and beauty, no matter how your trade goes.
The sea with It's ceaseless awful motion,
which began with Time, thrusts you aside; you
see how petty, trivial insignificant You are.


Nothing is more salutary than for q man to
know his own insigniiicance, and nowhere VIII
he be taught it more sharply than when he
sits down in the midst of the eternal calm
movements of Nature; that is if he have eyes
to SEQ anything outside of his own little self.
If he have not, no will jeer with a sour small
beer wit at the quiet solemn voices of Nature
as silly sentiment But a manly, clear minded
man, going back into the town, listens With
nausea to its foul gossip and greedy bargain
driving, and wonders why they had seemed so
great and important to him few days be-
fore.


The old Morse story goes that Odn took his
old cup-bearer, before his death, for day
into the Valhalla when he came back among
his fellows he knew them as boorish and ILL
conditioned he would have had them all
heroes; he having dined with the gods and
eaten of their food. The old gods are not
dead even in modern New-York on this April
day; their table is spread and the feast set all
the year round, and any of us who choose may
20 and sup with them and bring back such
cleaner thoughts and better manners as we are
capable of receiving from noble company.