air-supporters. Down he darts, or aside he
shoots, or right up he soars, and you wish you were an Eagle. You have
reached Rest-and-be-thankful, yet rest you will not, and thankful you
will not be, and you scorn the mean inscription, which many a worthier
wayfarer has blessed, while sitting on that stone he has said, "give us
this day our daily bread," eat his crust, and then walked away contented
down to Cairndow. Just so has it been with you sitting at your appointed
place--pretty high up--on the road to the summit of the Biforked Hill.
You look up and see Byron--there "sitting where you may not soar,"--and
wish you were a great Poet. But you are no more a great Poet than an
Eagle eight feet from wing-tip to wing-tip--and will not
rest-and-be-thankful that you are a man and a Christian. Nay, you are
more, an author of no mean repute; and your prose is allowed to be
excellent, better far than the best paragraph in this our Morning
Monologue. But you are sick of walking, and nothing will satisfy you but
to fly. Be contented, as we are, with feet, and weep not for wings; and
let us take comfort together from a cheering quotation from the
philosophic Gray--

"For they that creep and they that fly,
Just end where they began!"

THE FIELD OF FLOWERS.

A May-morning on Ulswater and the banks of Ulswater--commingled earth
and heaven! Spring is many-coloured as Autumn; but now Joy scatters the
hues daily brightening into greener life, then Melancholy dropt them
daily dimming into yellower death. The fear of Winter then--but now the
hope of Summer; and Nature rings with hymns hailing the visible advent
of the perfect year. If for a moment the woods are silent, it is but to
burst forth anew into louder song. The rain is over and gone--but the
showery sky speaks in the streams on a hundred hills; and the wide
mountain gloom opens its heart to the sunshine that on many a dripping
precipice burns like fire. Nothing seems inanimate. The very clouds and
their shadows look alive--the trees, never dead, are wide-awakened from
their sleep--families of flowers are frequenting all the dewy
places--old walls are splendid with the light of lichens--and
birch-crowned cliffs up among the coves send down their fine fragrance
to the Lake on every bolder breath that whitens with breaking wavelets
the blue of its breezy bosom. Nor mute the voice of man. The shepherd is
whooping on the hill--the ploughman calling to his team somew