antalize the still surface. Above these the slender, dark-blue
insect waves his dusky wings, like a liberated ripple of the brook, and
takes the few stray sunbeams on his lustrous form. Whence came the
correspondence between this beautiful shy creature and the moist, dark
nooks, shot through with stray and transitory sunlight, where it
dwells? The analogy is as unmistakable as that between the scorching
heats of summer and the shrill cry of the cicada. They suggest
questions that no savant can answer, mysteries that wait, like Goethe's
secret of morphology, till a sufficient poet can be born. And we,
meanwhile, stand helpless in their presence, as one waits beside the
telegraphic wire, while it hums and vibrates, charged with all
fascinating secrets, above the heads of a wondering world.

It is by the presence of pathways on the earth that we know it to be
the habitation of man; in the barest desert, they open to us a common
humanity. It is the absence of these that renders us so lonely on the
ocean, and makes us glad to watch even the track of our own vessel. But
on the mountain-top, how eagerly we trace out the "road that brings
places together," as Schiller says. It is the first thing we look for;
till we have found it, each scattered village has an isolated and
churlish look, but the glimpse of a furlong of road puts them all in
friendly relations. The narrower the path, the more domestic and
familiar it seems.

The railroad may represent the capitalist or the government; the
high-road indicates what the surveyor or the county commissioners
thought best; but the footpath shows what the people needed. Its
associations are with beauty and humble life,--the boy with his dog,
the little girl with her fagots, the pedler with his pack; cheery
companions they are or ought to be.

"Jog on, jog on the footpath way,
And merrily hent the stile-a:
A merry heart goes all the day,
Your sad one tires in a mile-a."

The footpath takes you across the farms and behind the houses; you are
admitted to the family secrets and form a personal acquaintance. Even
if you take the wrong path, it only leads you "across-lots" to some man
ploughing, or some old woman picking berries,--perhaps a very spicy
acquaintance, whom the road would never have brought to light. If you
are led astray in the woods, that only teaches you to observe landmarks
more closely, or to leave straws and stakes for tokens, like a gypsy's
patteran,