boots, soaked through and through as they were, made very grateful music striking along the gravel. And after supper, while walking back and forth upon the piazza, in all the luxury of slippers and a winter overcoat, I turned more than once from the glories of the sunset to gaze upon the black slope of Lafayette, thinking within myself how much less comfortable I should be up yonder in the depths of the forest, so dark and wet, without company, without fire, without overcoat, and without supper. After all, mere animal comfort is not to be despised. Let us be thankful, I said, for the good things of life, of no matter what grade; yes, though they be only a change of clothing and a summer hotel.
It was laughable how my quiet ramble had turned out. My friend, the red-eyed vireo, may or may not have stuck to his text; but if he had seen me in the midst of my retreat, dashing through the bushes and clambering over the fallen trees, he certainly never would have guessed mine. "Consider the lilies," indeed! He was more likely to think of a familiar Old Testament scripture: "The wicked flee when no man pursueth."
A PITCH-PINE MEDITATION.
So waved the pine-tree through my thought.
Emerson.
In outward, every-day affairs, in what we foolishly call real life, man is a stickler for regularity, a devout believer in the maxim, "Order is heaven's first law." He sets his house at right angles with the street; lays out his grounds in the straightest of straight lines, or in the most undeviating of curves; selects his shade-trees for their trim, geometrical habit; and, all in all, carries himself as if precision and conformity were the height of virtue. Yet this same man, when he comes to deal with pictorial representations, makes up his judgment according to quite another standard; finding nothing picturesque in tidy gardens and shaven lawns, discarding without hesitation every well-rounded, symmetrical tree, delighting in disorder and disproportion, loving a ruin better than the best appointed
palace, and a tumble-down wall better than the costliest and stanchest of new-laid masonry. It is hard to know what to think of an inconsistency like this. Why should taste and principle be thus opposed to each other, as if the same man were half Philistine, half Bohemian? Can this strong æsthetic preference for imperfection be based upon some permanent, universal law, or is it only a passing whim, the fashion of an hour?
Whatever we may say of such a problem,—and where one knows nothing, it is perhaps wisest to say nothing,—we may surely count it an occasion for thankfulness that a thing so common as imperfection should have at least its favorable side. Music would soon become tame, if not intolerable, without here and there a discord; and who knows how stupid life itself might prove without some slight admixture of evil? From my study-windows I can see sundry of the newest and most commodious mansions in town; but I more often look, not at them, but at a certain dilapidated old house, blackening for want of paint, and fast falling into decay, but with one