love. He has left
the hawthorn indeed, but only for a minute or two, to fetch a few seeds,
and comes back each time more full of song-talk than ever. He notes no
slow movement of the oak's shadow on the grass; it is nothing to him and
his lady dear that the sun, as seen from his nest, is crossing from one
great bough of the oak to another. The dew even in the deepest and most
tangled grass has long since been dried, and some of the flowers that
close at noon will shortly fold their petals. The morning airs, which
breathe so sweetly, come less and less frequently as the heat increases.
Vanishing from the sky, the last fragments of cloud have left an
untarnished azure. Many times the bees have returned to their hives, and
thus the index of the day advances. It is nothing to the greenfinches;
all their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them
all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know whether
it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling, for joy, for
love.

And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they are not
restless; they have so much time, you see. So, too, the whitethroat in
the wild parsley; so, too, the thrush that just now peered out and partly
fluttered his wings as he stood to look. A butterfly comes and stays on
a leaf--a leaf much warmed by the sun--and shuts his wings. In a minute
he opens them, shuts them again, half wheels round, and by-and-by--just
when he chooses, and not before--floats away. The flowers open, and
remain open for hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is the only word one
can make up to describe it; there is much rest, but no haste. Each
moment, as with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it seems so
long and so sufficient in itself. Not only the days, but life itself
lengthens in summer. I would spread abroad my arms and gather more of it
to me, could I do so.

All the procession of living and growing things passes. The grass stands
up taller and still taller, the sheaths open, and the stalk arises, the
pollen clings till the breeze sweeps it. The bees rush past, and the
resolute wasps; the humble-bees, whose weight swings them along. About
the oaks and maples the brown chafers swarm, and the fern-owls at dusk,
and the blackbirds and jays by day, cannot reduce their legions while
they last. Yellow butterflies, and white, broad red admirals, and sweet
blues; think of the kingdom of flowers which i