trange new hope I, too,
was part of nature, and it was spring! Tender leaves and blossoms were
unfolding from my heart. Bright flowers of love and gratitude were
opening round its roots. I felt new strength in all my limbs. New blood
was pulsing through my veins. Nobler thoughts and nobler longings were
throbbing through my brain.

As I walked, Nature came and talked beside me, and showed me the world
and myself, and the ways of God seemed clearer.

It seemed to me a pity that all the beautiful and precious thoughts and
ideas that were crowding in upon me should be lost to my fellow-men, and
so I pitched my tent at a little cottage, and set to work to write them
down then and there as they came to me.

"It has been complained of me," I said to myself, "that I do not write
literary and high class work--at least, not work that is exceptionally
literary and high-class. This reproach shall be removed. I will write
an article that shall be a classic. I have worked for the ordinary,
every-day reader. It is right that I should do something now to improve
the literature of my beloved country."

And I wrote a grand essay--though I say it who should not, though I
don't see why I shouldn't--all about spring, and the way it made you
feel, and what it made you think. It was simply crowded with elevated
thoughts and high-class ideas and cultured wit, was that essay. There
was only one fault about that essay: it was too brilliant. I wanted
commonplace relief. It would have exhausted the average reader; so much
cleverness would have wearied him.

I wish I could remember some of the beautiful things in that essay, and
here set them down; because then you would be able to see what they
were like for yourselves, and that would be so much more simpler than
my explaining to you how beautiful they were. Unfortunately, however, I
cannot now call to mind any of them.

I was very proud of this essay, and when I got back to town I called on
a very superior friend of mine, a critic, and read it to him. I do not
care for him to see any of my usual work, because he really is a very
superior person indeed, and the perusal of it appears to give him pains
inside. But this article, I thought, would do him good.

"What do you think of it?" I asked, when I had finished.

"Splendid," he replied, "excellently arranged. I never knew you were
so well acquainted with the works of the old writers. Why, there is
scarcely a classic of any note that you