——"O beate Sexti,
Vitæ summa brevis SPEM nos vetat inchoare LONGAM!"
Not all the morose sarcasms of Johnson, on the pleasures of rural life, have ever weakened my capability for enjoying it at convenient intervals. His antipathy to the country resembled his contempt for blank-verse—he could not enjoy it. I have now moped away a considerable number of months in this city of all things—this—this London. "Well?" Pray restrain yourself, reader; I am coming to the point in due season. During my metropolitan existence—although I am neither a tailor, nor any trade, nor anything exactly—I have never beheld a downright intellectual-looking blade of grass. I mean much by an intellectual blade of grass. The Londoners—poor conceited creatures!—have denominated sundry portions of their Babylon "fields." But—I ask it in all the honest pride of sheer ignorance—is there the ghost even of a bit of grass to be seen in many of them? I cannot easily forget my vexation, when, after a tedious walk to one of those misnomered "fields," I found nothing but a weather-beaten, muggy, smoky assemblage of houses of all sizes, circumscribed by appropriate filth and abundant cabbage-stumps. Innocent of London quackeries, I strolled forth with the full hope of laying me down on a velvet carpet of grass—the birds carolling around me—and, perchance, a flock of lambkins, tunefully baying to their mammas!! "Said I to myself," when I reached these fields, "what a fool I am!" I had contemplated a doze on the grass.
But leaving all thoughts of disappointment, who will not allow that there is something exceedingly delightful in dozing calmly beneath the shade of an o'er-arching tree?
——"recubans sub tegmine fagi."
Of course, the weather should be fine, to admit of this luxurious idleness. Let the blue-bosomed clouds be sailing along, like Peter Bell's boat; let the sunbeams be gilding the face of nature, and tinging the landscape with multiform hues; let the breezes be gentle, the spot retired, and the heart at ease. Now, go and stretch yourself on the grassy couch, while the branches of an aged tree shadow forth the imaged leaves around you. What a congenial situation for philosophy—under an old tree, on a sunny summer day! How much more becoming than the immortal tub of the sour-minded Diogenes? Who will be able to refrain from philosophizing. I repeat it, beneath such an old tree? 'Tis at such times that the heart spontaneously unbends itself—that the fancy tranquillizes its thoughts—and that memory awakens her
——"treasured pictures of a thousand scenes."
Place the palms of your hands beneath your pole, and survey the skies!—calm, beautifully unconscious! By-gone times, and by-gone friends—the thousand commingling scenes of varied life—how they all recur to you now! You fancy you could lie beneath the tree for eternity—so soothing is the employment of doing nothing—or field philosophy! Yet, to speak correctly, you are doing a great deal; your imagination is flying in all directions—from the death of Caesar to the last cup of Congou that you took with a regretted friend. What a mystery your existence is! The world turns round as gently as ever; the flowers bud into life; and the winter nips them. Man lives, thinks, and dies. All very wondrous truisms. Well, after a half-hour—or perchance more—you will be gradually relapsing into a state of soporific nothing-at-all-ness (the best word I can find to express my meaning.) May there be some clear little stream just behind you, laughing along its idle way;—some chirping birds, singing their roundelay—some buzzing flies—you will then be lulled into doziness. However, with or without the purling murmur of the brook—the joyous warbling of the birds—the busy bustling flies—you will not be able to resist the dozing temptations that will steal over you. Your eyes will close gently as flower-leaflets—your thoughts die away in a heavenly confusion—and then you doze!—neither sleeping nor waking, but absolved in delicious dreaminess! O, for such a doze!—Monthly Magazine.