y of common earth. There has been rain during the
night--enough, and no more, to enliven nature--the mists are ascending
composedly with promise of gentle weather--and the sun, so mild that we
can look him in the face with unwinking eyes, gives assurance that as he
has risen so will he reign, and so will he set in peace.

Yet we cannot help thinking it somewhat remarkable, that, to the best of
our memory, never once were we the very first out into the dawn. We say
nothing of birds--for they, with their sweet jargoning, anticipate it,
and from their bed on the bough feel the forerunning warmth of the
sunrise; neither do we allude to hares, for they are "hirpling hame," to
sleep away the light hours, open-eyed, in the briery quarry in the
centre of the trackless wood. Even cows and horses we can excuse being
up before us, for they have bivouacked; and the latter, as they often
sleep standing, are naturally somnambulists. Weasels, too, we can pardon
for running across the road before us, and as they reach the
hole-in-the-wall, showing by their clear eyes that they have been awake
for hours, and have probably breakfasted on leveret. We have no spite at
chanticleer, nor the hooting owls against whom he is so lustily crowing
hours before the orient; nor do we care although we know that is not the
first sudden plunge of the tyrant trout into the insect cloud already
hovering over the tarn. But we confess that it is a little mortifying to
our pride of time and place, to meet an old beggar-woman, who from the
dust on her tattered brogues has evidently marched miles from her last
night's wayside howf, and who holds out her withered palm for charity,
at an hour when a cripple of fourscore might have been supposed sleeping
on her pallet of straw. A pedlar, too, who has got through a portion of
the Excursion before the sun has illumed the mountain-tops, is
mortifying, with his piled pack and ellwand. There, as we are a
Christian, is Ned Hurd, landing a pike on the margin of the Reed-pool,
on his way from Hayswater, where he has been all night angling, till his
creel is as heavy as a sermon; and a little further on, comes issuing
like a Dryad's daughter, from the gate in the lane, sweet little Alice
Elleray, with a basket dangling beneath her arm, going in her orphan
beauty to gather, in their season, wild strawberries or violets in the
woods.

Sweet orphan of Wood-edge! what would many a childless pair give for a
creature one-half