fold sheep in the night, and fears no manner of ill,
because she means none: yet, to say the truth, she is never alone, for
she is still accompanied with old songs, honest thoughts, and prayers,
but short ones; yet they have their efficacy, in that they are not
palled with ensuing idle cogitations. Lastly, her dreams are so chaste,
that she dare tell them; only a Friday's dream is all her superstition;
that she conceals for fear of anger. Thus lives she; and all her care is
she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her
winding-sheet."

The love of the country has been sung by poets, and echoed by
philosophers; but the first have not attempted, and the last have been
greatly puzzled to account for it. I do not know that any one has ever
explained, satisfactorily, the true source of this feeling, or of that
soothing emotion which the sight of the country, or a lively description
of rural objects hardly ever fails to infuse into the mind. Some have
ascribed this feeling to the natural beauty of the objects themselves;
others to the freedom from care, the silence and tranquillity which
scenes of retirement afford; others to the healthy and innocent
employments of a country life; others to the simplicity of country
manners, and others to a variety of different causes; but none to the
right one. All these, indeed, have their effect; but there is another
principal one which has not been touched upon, or only slightly glanced
at. I will not, however, imitate Mr. Horne Tooke, who after enumerating
seventeen different definitions of the verb, and laughing at them all as
deficient and nugatory, at the end of two quarto volumes does not tell
us what the verb really is, and has left posterity to pluck out "the
heart of his mystery." I will say at once what it is that distinguishes
this interest from others, and that is its _abstractedness_. The
interest we feel in human nature is exclusive, and confined to the
individual; the interest we feel in external nature is common, and
transferable from one object to all others of the same class. Thus.

Rousseau in his Confessions relates, that when he took possession of
his room at Annecy, he found that he could see "a little spot of green"
from his window, which endeared his situation the more to him, because,
he says, it was the first time he had had this object constantly before
him since he left Boissy, the place where he was at school when a child.
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