M.
READINGS WITH MY PENCIL.
NO. III.
Legere sine calamo est dormire.—Quintilian.
21. "There is a pride, in being left behind, to find resources within, which others seek without."—Washington Irving.
I have pondered a good deal on this passage, and find a beautiful moral in what, when I first read it, I was fain to fancy but a misanthropic, or, at the least, an unsocial sentiment. I now feel and acknowledge its truth. "There is a pride in being left behind, to find resources within, which others seek without." What concern have I in the greater brightness that another's name is shedding? Let them shine on whose honor is greater. Their orbit cannot interfere with mine. There may be something very grand and sublime in the wide sweep of Herschel and Saturn: but planets, whose path is smaller, are more cheered by the rays of light and warmth from the sun, which is the centre of their revolutions.
22. "Oh the hopeless misery of March in America. Poetry, taste, fancy, feeling,—all are chilled by that ever-snowing sky, that ever snow clad earth. Man were happy could he be a mole for the nonce, and so sleep out this death-in-life, an American six months' winter."—Subaltern in America.
What a querulous noodle! He is one of those who can "travel from Dan to Beersheba, and cry, All is barren!" It is March, and "March in America," while I write. The air is bracing and full of reviving springlike influences. I disagree with the would-be mole from whom I quote. I love to watch every month's sweep of the sun,—while he is performing his low wintry arc, as if almost ashamed to revolve around the cheerless earth, and while he daily performs a wider and wider circle, until at length he comes to stand nearly over my head at noon. I enjoy the result the more intensely for watching its progress. I love to watch him gradually calling out the green on the black hills around me, whose only beauty now are the narrow stripes of fading snow, forming white borders that intersect each other, thus dividing the mould into something not altogether void of the picturesque. So, on yonder field, where the sun now shines quite cheeringly, there is a remnant of beauty. The dead grass, with its yellow and reddish tinge, is divided by small crystal ponds and canals, glistening in the bright ray, and seeming like the gratitude of the poor,—able to return but little, yet determined to return that little gladly.
23. "There is no motion so graceful as that of a beautiful girl in the mazy meanderings of the dance. Nature cannot furnish a more perfect illustration of the poetry of motion than this."—Ibid.