INTERLEAVES
Sports and Pastimes
In ancient tapestries, centuries old, you sometimes see, wrought in delicate needlework that is faded with the lapse of years, pictures of the sports of the period. There will be quaint scenes showing otter and bear hunting, swans' nesting, hawking, chasing the deer, and the like; in-door scenes, too, depicting pretty pages strumming musical instruments, and lovely ladies at their tambour or 'broidery frames.
The poetry of each passing age preserves pictures of its plays and diversions still more perfectly than worn and tattered tapestry, and the verses we have chosen cover a bewildering variety of pastimes and recreations. The poets have sounded the praises of almost every kind of sport: angling, swimming, skating, bubble-blowing, going a-Maying, walking, riding, whittling, nutting, the country pleasures of "the barefoot boy," the joys of reading, the delights of music, and the exhilarations of cruising and travelling. One poem of the immediate present, Beeching's "Bicycling Song," shows us that the sport of the moment need not of necessity be too commonplace to be wrought into verse. At first thought the amusements of these latter days are so swift and breathless, so complicated with steam, electricity, and other great forces of the new era, that they seem less poetic than the picturesque frolics of milkmaids and shepherds, the games of the old Greeks or the gay sports of the days of chivalry. But after all, as Lowell said, "there is as much poetry in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed that fed on men. If you cut an apple across, you may trace in it the lines of the blossom that the bee hummed around in May; and so the soul of poetry survives in things prosaic."