idle hours;
But laughing streams with gold are laden,
And sweets are hidden 'neath the flowers.

'E'en outcasts may have heart and feeling,
E'en such as I be fond and true;
And love, like light, in dungeons stealing,
Though bars be there, will still burst through.'

PICTURES FROM THE NORTH.

It is worth while to live in the city, that we may learn to love the
country; and it is not bad for many, that artificial life binds them
with bonds of silk or lace or rags or cobwebs, since, when they are rent
away, the Real gleams out in a beauty and with a zest which had not been
save for contrast.

Contrast is the salt of the beautiful. I wonder that the ancients, who
came so near it in so many ways, never made a goddess of Contrast. They
had something like it in ever-varying Future--something like it in
double-faced Janus, who was their real 'Angel of the Odd.' Perhaps it is
my ignorance which is at fault--if so, I pray you correct me. The subtle
Neo-Platonists _must_ have apotheosized such a savor to all aesthetic
bliss. Mostly do I feel its charm when there come before me pictures
true to life of far lands and lives, of valley and river, sea and shore.
Then I forget the narrow office and the shop-lined street, the rattling
cars and hurried hotel-lodgment, and think what it would be if nature,
in all her freshness and never-ending contrasts, could be my
ever-present.

I thought this yesterday, in glancing over an old manuscript in my
drawer, containing translations, by some hand to me unknown, of sketches
of Sweden by the fairy-story teller Hans Christian Andersen. Reader,
will they strike you as pleasantly as they did me? I know not. Let us
glance them over. They have at least the full flavor of the North, of
the healthy land of frost and pines, of fragrant birch and of sweeter
meadow-grass, and simpler, holier flowers than the rich South ever
showed, even in her simplest moods.

The first of these sketches sweeps us at once far away over the
Northland:

'WE JOURNEY.

'It is spring, fragrant spring, the birds are singing. You do not
understand their song? Then hear it in free translation:

''Seat thyself upon my back!' said the stork, the holy bird of our
green island. 'I will carry thee over the waves of the Sound.
Sweden also has its fresh, fragrant beechwoods, green meadows, and
fields of waving corn; in Schoonen, under the blooming apple trees