solitude. The heavens
shining over me, and the scattered household fires declare to me that
fellowship of light in which Nature holds out her hand to man and leads
him, step by step, to the unspeakable splendours of her central sun.

Chapter V

The Open Fields

One of the sights upon which my eyes rest oftenest and with deepest
content is a broad sweep of meadow slowly climbing the western sky
until it pauses at the edge of a noble piece of woodland. It is a
playground of wind and flowers and waving grasses. There are, indeed,
days when it lies cold and sad under inhospitable skies, but for the
most part the heavens are in league with cloud and sun to protect its
charm against all comers. When the turf is fresh, all the promise of
summer is in its tender green; a little later, and it is sown thick
with daisies and buttercups; and as the breeze plays upon it these
frolicsome flowers, which have known no human tending, seem to chase
each other in endless races over the whole expanse. I have seen them
run breathlessly up the long slope, and then suddenly turn and rush
pell-mell down again. If the wind had only stopped for a moment its
endless gossip with the leaves, I am sure I should have heard the
gleeful shouts, the sportive cries, of these vagrant flowers whose
spell is rewoven over every generation of children, and whose unstudied
beauty and joy recall, with every summer, some of the clews which most
of us have lost in our journey through life. Even as I write, I see
the white and yellow heads tossing to and fro in a mood of free and
buoyant being, which has for me, face to face with the problems of
living, an unspeakable pathos.

What a depth of tender colour fills the arch of heaven as it bends over
this playground of the blooming and beauty-laden forces of nature! The
great summer clouds, shaping their courses to invisible harbours across
the trackless aerial sea, love to drop anchor here and slowly trail
their mighty shadows, vainly groping for something that shall make them
fast. The winds, that have come roaring through the woodlands, subdue
their harsh voices and linger long in their journey across this sunny
expanse. It is true, they sing no lullabies as in the hollow under the
hill where they themselves often fall asleep, but the music to which
they move has a magical cadence of joy in it, and sets our thought to
the dancing mood of the flowers.

Sometimes, on quiet afternoons, when the