ead?

The place toward which we tend is at some little distance, and our road
thither leads through all manner of comely rustic places, flowered
fields, where the buttercups crowd their little varnished cups, and the
vigilant ox-eyes are already wakefully staring up from among the
grass-spears; a little wood; a deep and ruddy-colored lane, along whose
unpruned hedges straggle the riches of the wild-rose, most delicately
flushed, as if God in passing had called her very good, and she had
reddened at his praise; where the honey-suckle, too, is holding stilly
aloft the open cream-colored trumpets and closed red trumpet-buds of her
heaven-sweet crown.

In an instant Tou Tou is scrawling and scrambling like a great spider up
the steep bank: in an instant more she is tugging, tearing, devastating;
while the faint petals that no mightiest king can restore, but that any
infant with a touch can destroy, are showering in scented ruin around
her. It gives me a pain to see it, as if I saw some sentient thing in
agony. I think I feel, with Walter Savage Landor--

"I never pluck the rose; the violet's head
Hath shaken with my breath upon its bank
And not reproached me: the ever-sacred cup
Of the pure lily hath between my hands
Felt safe, unsoiled, nor lost one grain of gold."

"You will have your basket filled before we get there," I say,
remonstrating, but she does not heed me.

Hot and scratched--at least I am glad that in their death-pain they were
able to scratch her--she still tugs and mauls. I walk on. We reach the
meadow. Well, at least _to-day_ we are in time. It has the silence and
solitude of the dawn of Creation's first still day, broken only by the
sheep that are cropping

"The slant grass, and daisies pale."

The slow, smooth river washes by, sucking in among the rushes. Our
footsteps show plainly shaped as we step along through the hoary dew. We
separate--going one this way, one that--and, in silence and gravity,
pace with bent heads and down-turned eyes through the fine, short grass.
Excitement and emulation keep us dumb, for let who will--_blase_ and
used up--deny it, but there is an excitement, wholesome and hearty, in
_seeking_, and a joy pure and unadulterated in finding, mushrooms in a
probable field in the hopeful morning; whether the mushroom be a
patriarch whose gills are browned with age, and who is big enough to be
an umbrella for the fairy people, or a little milk-white butto