In the country, with a soft, calm, hazy afternoon to keep you company! To feel that Nature and yourself have moods in common, for you are lazy and Nature is lazy, too, and blinks sleepily at you from filmy, dreamy eyes that open and shut with your own in a sort of drowsy rhythm. What more delightful than to yield yourself entirely to the present mood and wander off somewhere, aimless except to see and feel? The trim soberness of the dusty road with its gray windings and vistas of sand-ruts becomes less matter-of-fact at length, and so you leave it to itself, and seek a path that leads to the heart of Nature and far from ways of men. Down grassy slopes and over little hillocks that pique your curiosity by shutting out the view of what is coming next; now skirting the edge of a furrowed potato-patch, and now sauntering down cool lanes of corn, listening to the breezy lisping of the long, green leaves that flap you softly in the face; now across a moist spot where a spring bubbles forth, apparently only to nourish a family of cowslips, and so on and on until you break the stillness of a shady wood as your feet keep alternate time among the heaps of leaves whose rustling is varied by the occasional noise of crackling twigs. The damp air, freshened by contact with trickling drops and oozy bogs, and perfumed with spicy cedar, soothes and cools. Yonder lies prostrate some mighty giant of the forest, victim of a ruthless storm, grim with decay and raising a vertical base of black sod and tangled roots torn from the earth where a gaping wound shows its former place. Here a rock, moist with swamp-sweat, lichen-covered and set in moss. There a clump of thick-grown cedars, deep shelter for the timid rabbit. All is noiseless, breathless. Not even the squirrel chatters, for it is not long past noon. But farther on comes a dull, low murmuring, scarcely to be heard at first, so nicely does it fit this gentle monotone of silence, yet soon filling the trembling air with overtones that rise and fall and swell again in varying chords. It is the river. A few steps more and you are there, and beside the stream in a fragrant bed of ferns, with one hand caressing the delicate tresses of the maidenhair, and the other dipped among the ripples, you give yourself up, half dozing, to thoughts of the long ago and the far away that seem to float up from the past along the dim windings of the stream. The sun makes dancing spots of dark and light between the fluttering leaves, and throws a changing shadow upon yon deep pool, where a grand old beech, festooned with clematis, leans its gray trunk far over as if to bless the stream whose waters, bubbling swiftly over the pebbles a little higher up, calm themselves here to rest in peace. The wood-thrush sends its plaintive, solitary note of silver-globuled melody from the inmost forest. No other sound, save when a wagon now and then rolls its quick rumble across a bridge, and then is gone like some self-conscious intruder. But luxury like this is the very thief of time. Before you are aware the waves of heat have ceased to form a throbbing air-hive for humming insects, and the cool of early twilight has come on, attended by lengthening shadows. And so home again along the dewy fields, while an orchestra of crickets chirps a happy end beneath the summer stars to the day that is done. It is in ways like this that poets renew their souls, the old their youth, and weary hearts, in sweet release from care, gain strength for life.

Literary Monthly, 1887.