Much as a man may be street-ridden, after long city experience—even as the old and rheumatic become bed-ridden—yet the far-off shores of Hoboken, and the tree-whispers of St. John's and Grammercy Parks, do keep alive somewhat of the Eden longings, which are born into the world with us, and which can only die when our hearts are dead.
And hence it is that we find it a loving duty to linger much and often as we may in this sunny season of the year (alas, that it should be only in imagination!) around rural haunts—plucking flowers with broad-bonneted girls—studying shadows with artist eye—brushing the dews away with farmers' boys—lolling in pools with sleek-limbed cattle—dropping worms or minnow with artist anglers, and humming to ourselves, in the soft and genial spirit of the scene, such old-time pleasant verses as these:
The lofty woods, the forests wide and long,
Adorned with leaves and branches fresh and green,
In whose cool bowers the birds with many a song
Do welcome with their quire the summer's queen;
The meadows fair, where Flora's gifts among
Are intermixed with verdant grass between;
The silver-scaled fish that softly swim
Within the sweet brook's crystal watery stream.
All these and many more of His creation
That made the Heavens, the angler oft doth see;
Taking therein no little delectation,
To think how strange, how wonderful they be;
Framing, thereof, an inward contemplation,
To set his heart from other fancies free;
And while he looks on these with joyful eye,
His mind is rapt above the starry sky.
And since we are thus in the humor of old and rural-imaged verse—notwithstanding the puff and creak of the printing enginery is coming up from the caverns below us (a very Vulcan to the Venus of our thought) we shall ask your thanks for yet another triad of verses, which will (if you be not utterly barren) breed daisies on your vision.
The poet has spoken of such omnibus drives and Perrine pavements as offended good sense two or three hundred years ago:
Let them that list these pleasures then pursue,
And on their foolish fancies feed their fill;
So I the fields and meadows green may view,
And by the rivers fresh may walk at will,
Among the daizies and the violets blue,
Red hyacinth, and yellow daffodil,
Purple narcissus like the morning rayes,
Pale ganderglas, and azure culverkayes.
I count it better pleasure to behold
The goodly compass of the loftie skie;
And in the midst thereof, like burning gold,
The flaming chariot of the world's great eye;
The wat'ry clouds that in the ayre up rolled
With sundry kinds of painted colors flie;
And faire Aurora lifting up her head,
All blushing rise from old Tithonus' bed.
The hills and mountains raised from the plains,
The plains extended level with the ground,
The ground divided into sundry vaines,
The vaines enclosed with running rivers round,
The rivers making way through Nature's chaines,
With headlong course into the sea profound;
The surging sea beneath the vallies low,
The vallies sweet, and lakes that gently flow.
The reader may thank us for a seasonable bouquet—tied up with old ribbon indeed, and in the old free and easy way—but the perfume is richer than the artificial scents of your modern verse.