ing woods give a poor man's
lodging to the cold daffodil--a scanty kind taking the wind with a short
stalk and giving it but small petals to buffet--we have already said
farewell to the tall and splendid green-house daffodil that never braved
the cold. We gave to this our untimely welcome long before the snowdrop
came, and the golden name of daffodil has lost its vernal sound. And
when we part with the improved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardly
know or care whether the starveling is yet mustering in hollows of
woodlands, or whether it is over or to come. We are attending to a
yellower tulip, no doubt, when the only daffodil that Shakespeare knew is
opening in the chilly wood.

The reproach is a commonplace, but perhaps we have generally accused
ourselves of the impatience rather than of the listlessness, and have not
noted how we shorten the disarranged seasons and lay up for ourselves
memories confused and undefined. Late springs and early, gentle and
hard, are compelled to yield the same colours; haste has its way and its
revenges. If we are resolved to live quickly, why, nothing is easier.
There are no such brief days as those that are indistinct; and the
sliding on the way of time is, of all habits, the most tyrannously
careless. It is first a laxity, then a habit, and next a folly; and when
we keep neither Ash Wednesday nor the birthday of daffodils, and have
hardly felt the cold, and do not know where the sun rises, we are already
on the way of least resistance, the friction of life is gone; and in our
last old age the past will seem to dwindle even like the dwindled present
of our decline.

There has been one unconscious operation of the love of life, one single
grasp after variety, intended to save the year, to face it, to meet it,
to compel it to show a unique face and bear a name of its own; and this
is travel. It is the finest and most effectual flight against time of
all. What elastic days are those wherein I make head against a
travelling landscape, meet histories and boundaries, hail frontiers, face
a new manner of building, cross the regions of silver roofs and of heavy
Alpine stone, and bring with me the late light upon billowy gables and
red eaves! And how buoyant the week in which I anticipate the sun upon
the roofless east! How serried are the days with forests, how enlarged
by plains, how thronged by cities, how singled by the pine, how newly
audible by a new sea! Far was the sunris