Twenty years of life taught me that this is a world worth living in; at twenty-five I saw that light and darkness are but the face and back of a thing, there being a shadow where the sun shines. My thoughts, today, at thirty, are these: When full of joys sorrows are as deep, and the more pain the greater pleasure. Cut sorrows asunder from joys and I won’t be able to get along. Shall I fling them away? that will make an end of the world. Money is precious; but anxiety will eat you up, even in sleep, when it accumulates. Love is sweet; but you will yearn after the days when you knew it not, so soon as its very sweetness begins to weigh heavy on you. The shoulders of His Majesty’s Ministers are supporting the feet of millions and the whole country is weighing heavily on their backs. You miss nice things when you part with them without tasting; but you want more of them when you take only a little of them, while you get sick if you overload yourself....

Here my train of thought broke, as I found myself sitting involuntarily on a good-sized boulder, my left foot having, in its effort to avert a peril, caused by a slip of my right foot, landed me in that posture. Fortunately I was none the worse for the accident, except that my color-box jerked itself forward from under my arm, which was not much.

As I rose from my forced rest, I saw at a distance, to my right, a peak of mountain, the very shape of a bucket with its bottom up, covered from foot to summit by thick dark greens, studded with blossoming cherries in a dreamy relief, behind a screen of haze. A little nearer there rose a bare mountain, rising shoulders above the others, with its flank cut straight down as by a giant’s axe. The foot of its craggy side sank into a dark abyss. A figure of man wrapped in a red blanket was coming down from the height and I thought my climb would have to take me up there. The road was very exasperating. If clay only, it would not have required such very great labor to negotiate, but there were boulders, which refused to be smoothed. Clay may be broken, but not rocks and there they lay determined not to give way. If unyielding on their part, then they must be passed by going round or else by surmounting them. The place was not easy to go up even without rocks; but to make it worse, it made a sharp angle in the centre, the sides of which rose sharply, so that it was more like walking the bed of a river than going up a road. However, not being in a particular hurry, I took time and slowly came up to the “Seven Bends”.

As I trudged upward, my ears suddenly caught a lark, his song coming up, as it were, from just below my feet. The carol was giddily busy and incessant, but my eyes saw nothing. That bird never stops and must, it appears, sing out the whole Spring day and every second of it till night. I looked down the valley left and right into the air, and up into the sky, but all in vain, as the unseen singer was heard to rise higher and higher. I thought the lark must have died in the clouds and his song only was floating in space. The road made a sharp turn here by an angular rock. A blind man might have plunged head first down the crag. But I managed to turn safely. Down in the valley the golden blossoms of the rape were in full bloom.

But the lark! It was Spring—Spring, when the whole creation feels blasé to drowsiness; cheerful to ecstacy. The cat forgets to pounce on the mice. Men become oblivious of being in debt; so oblivious, indeed, that they even fail to locate their own souls. But they come back to themselves, when they see a distant field waving with a golden sea of flowers, such as I was looking down upon in the valley. And they may locate their souls when they hear the lark. The lark does not sing with his throat; but it is his whole soul that sings. Of all creatures, of which you hear their soul’s activity in their songs, none is as lively as the lark. It was, indeed, joy itself, and as I thus thought, I became joyful, and thus, was Poetry.

Yes, poetry! Soon I was trying to repeat Shelley’s song of the lark; but I could recite only these lines:

“We look before and after

And pine for what is not

Our sincerest laughter

With pain is fraught;