The rich years were given us to increase,
not to impair, these cheap felicities. Sad or sinful is the life of
that man who finds not the heavens bluer and the waves more musical in
maturity than in 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 women; all the rhetoric, all the logic, we
fancy we have heard before; we have seen the pictures, we have listened
to the symphonies: but what has been done by all the art and literature
of the world towards describing one summer 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 greatest success they
have not an horizon to their life so large as that of yon boy in his
punt. All that is purchasable in the capitals of the world is not to be
weighed in comparison with the simple enjoyment that may be crowded into
one hour of sunshine. What can place or power do here? "Who could be
before me, though the palace of Caesar cracked and split with emperors,
while I, sitting in silence on a cliff of Rhodes, watched the sun as he
swung his golden censer athwart the heavens?"
It is pleasant to observe a sort of confused and latent recognition of
all this in the instinctive sympathy which is always rendered to any
indication of out-door pursuits.
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