The involuntary
reaches of the spirit tend toward the True and the Natural. The flowers,
the clouds, and the fresh-smelling earth, all give width to your intent.
The boy grows into manliness, instead of growing to be like men. He
claims--with tears almost of brotherhood--his kinship with Nature; and
he feels in the mountains his heirship to the Father of Nature!
This delirium of feeling may not find expression upon the lip of the
boy; but yet it underlies his thought, and will without his
consciousness give the spring to his musing dreams.
----So it is, that, as you lie there upon the sunny greensward, at the
old Squire's door, you muse upon the time when some rich-lying land,
with huge granaries, and cosy old mansion sleeping under the trees,
shall be yours,--when the brooks shall water your meadows, and come
laughing down your pasture-lands,--when the clouds shall shed their
spring fragrance upon your lawns, and the daisies bless your paths.
You will then be a Squire, with your cane, your lean-limbed hound, your
stocking-leg of specie, and your snuffbox. You will be the happy and
respected husband of some tidy old lady in black, and spectacles,--a
little phthisicky, like Frank's grandmother,--and an accomplished cook
of stewed pears and Johnny-cakes!
It seems a very lofty ambition at this stage of growth to reach such
eminence, as to convert your drawer in the wainscot, that has a secret
spring, into a bank for the country people; and the power to send a man
to jail seems one of those stretches of human prerogative to which few
of your fellow-mortals can ever hope to attain.
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