When I was a child we lived on the border of the town, and the road that passed our windows went in two ways. One branch ran up the hill under the old city gateway and out through the mean city “lanes.” The other branch turned round our corner and ran into the countryside. Day and night many carts lumbered by our windows, in plain hearing. In the day-time I took no pleasure in them, but when I awoke at night and the thick silence was broken by the noise of a single deliberate cart it filled me with vague enchantment. I still feel this enchantment. The steady effort of the wheels, their rattle as they passed over the uneven road, their crunching deliberateness, gives me a sense of acute pleasure. That pleasure is at its highest when a solitary lantern swings underneath the wagon. In the old days the load might be coal, with the colliery-man sitting hunched on the driver’s seat, a battered silhouette. Or the load might be from the brewery, making a start at dawn. Or it might be a load of singing harvest-women, hired in the market square by the sweet light of the morning. But not the wagon or the sight of the wagoner pleases me, so much as that honest, steady, homely sound coming through the vacancy of the night. I like it, I find it friendly and companionable, and I hope to like it till I die.

The city sounds improve with distance. Sometimes, in lazy summer evenings, I like the faint rumble, the growing roar, the receding rumble of the elevated, with the suggestion of its open windows and its passengers relaxed and indolent after the exhausting day. Always I like the moaning sounds from the river craft, carried so softly into the town. But New York sounds and Chicago sounds are usually discords. I hate bells—the sharp spinsterish telephone bell, the lugubrious church bell, the clangorous railway bell. Well, perhaps not the sleigh bell or the dinner bell.

I like the element of water. An imagist should write of the waters of Lake Michigan which circle around Mackinac Island: the word crystal is the hackneyed word for those pure lucent depths. When the sun shines on the bottom, every pebble is seen in a radiance of which the jewel is a happy memory. In Maine lakes and along the coast of Maine one has the same visual delight in water as clear as crystal, and on the coast of Ireland I have seen the Atlantic Ocean slumber in a glowing amethyst or thunder in a wall of emerald. On the southern shore of Long Island, who has not seen the sumptuous ultramarine, with a surf as snowy as apple-blossom? After shrill and meager New York, the color of that Atlantic is drenching.

The dancing harbor of New York is a beauty that never fades, but I hate the New York skyline except at night. In the day-time those punctured walls seem imbecile to me. They look out on the river with such a lidless, such an inhuman, stare. Nothing of man clings to them. They are barren as the rocks, empty as the deserted vaults of cliff-dwellers. A little wisp of white steam may suggest humanity, but not these bleak cliffs themselves. At night, however, they become human. They look out on the black moving river with marigold eyes. And Madison Square at nightfall has the same, or even a more Ætherial, radiance. From the hurried streets the walls of light seem like a deluge of fairy splendor. This is always a gay transformation to the eye of the city-dweller, who is forever oppressed by the ugliness around him.

Flowers are pleasant things to most people. I like flowers, but seldom cut flowers. The gathering of wild flowers seems to me unnecessarily wanton, and is it not hateful to see people coming home with dejected branches of dogwood or broken autumn festoons or apple-blossoms already rusting in the train? I like flowers best in the fullness of the meadow or the solitude of a forsaken garden. Few things are so pleasant as to find oneself all alone in a garden that has, so to speak, drifted out to sea. The life that creeps up between its broken flagstones, the life that trails so impudently across the path, the life that spawns in the forgotten pond—this has a fascination beyond the hand of gardeners. Once I shared a neglected garden with an ancient turtle, ourselves the only living things within sight or sound. When the turtle wearied of sunning himself he shuffled to the artificial pond, and there he lazily paddled through waters laced down with scum. It was pleasant to see him, a not too clean turtle in waters not too clean. Perhaps if the family had been home the gardener would have scoured him.

Yet order is pleasant. If I were a millionaire—which I thank heaven I am not, nor scarcely a millionth part of one—I should take pleasure in the silent orderliness that shadowed me through my home. Those invisible hands that patted out the pillows and shined the shoes and picked up everything, even the Sunday newspapers—those I should enjoy. I should enjoy especially the guardian angel who hid from me the casualties of the laundry and put the surviving laundry away. In heaven there is no laundry, or mending of laundry. For the millionaire the laundry is sent and the laundry is sorted away. Blessed be the name of the millionaire; I envy him little else. Except, perhaps, his linen sheets.

The greatest of all platitudes is the platitude that life is in the striving. Is this altogether true? I think not. Not for those menial offices so necessary to our decent existence, so little decent in their victims or themselves. But one does remember certain striving that brought with it almost instant happiness, like the reward of the child out coasting or the boy who has made good in a hard, grinding game. It is pleasant to think of one’s first delicious surrender to fatigue after a long day’s haul on a hot road. That surrender, in all one’s joints, with all one’s driven will, is the ecstasy that even the Puritan allowed himself. It is the nectar of the pioneer. In our civilization we take it away from the workers, as we take the honey from the bees—but I wish to think of things pleasant, not of our civilization. Fatigue of this golden kind is unlike the leaden fatigue of compulsion or of routine. It is the tang that means a man is young. If one gets it from games, even golf, I think it is pleasant. It is the great charm that Englishmen possess and understand.

These are ordinary pleasant things, not the pleasant things of the poet. They barely leave the hall of pleasant things. A true poet, I imagine, is one who captures in the swift net of his imagination the wild pleasantnesses and delights that to me would be flying presences quickly lost to view. But every man must bag what he can in his own net, whether he be rational or poetic. For myself, I have to use my imagination to keep from being snared by too many publicists and professors and persons of political intent. These are invaluable servants of humanity, admirable masters of our mundane institutions. But they fill the mind with -ations. They pave the meadows with concrete; they lose the free swing of pleasant things.