CHAPTER V. SWIMMING FIELDS-DISTANT FENCE-LINES-OPEN ROADS -WAYS THROUGH WOODS. "A thing of beauty is a joy forever; Pass into nothingness, but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing; A flowery band to bind us to the earth." KEATS. We now present a few more ordinary appearances, not without scenic interest if but observed with the spirit felt by the bard, or which by culture may spring up in almost any one not a bard. Most have noticed how a day or two of rain, such as we sometimes have in summer, will drench and saturate the fields with wetness, so that the herbage, while it freshens to a livelier green, seems as it were to be buoyed up by the liquid element that fills it. After a parching drought, how the thirsty eye drinks and luxuriates in such a spectacle. Rainy-day idleness might here snatch at least a sip of pleasure; and the tasteful traveler would somewhat forget the drizzling clouds in such a refreshment of vision. The straight stone wall dividing green fields is a pleasant object to look at, especially if the roughness be lost in the distance and the fence appear as a dark smooth line marking the verdure. In the many positions of fences relative to each other and to the grassy level, the standing grain, the rounding hill, or the tall wood, there are various interesting aspects, which to the uninitiated need to be pointed out with the finger as well as described in language. There is a picturesque beauty in a simple road, with a strip of herbage for a border and a grey wall for rim, then on either side, the expanses of field or pasture verdure between which it runs. We have many a time stopped and gazed with a very desirable pleasure, at a little fragment of road thus circumstanced, rising white out of a valley and curving over a hill and then again lost. Indeed the richest picture in the gallery of art would not tempt us to exchange for its possession the capacity of enjoying the scenic beauty of a dusty highway, only let it be far enough off to give its best display, and nothing of its dust. A word more about roads. Take one stretching straight and far through a wood. As it runs on and on, its vista of whitish bottom, verdant walls and skyey roof, seem to narrow and narrow toward a point, the perspective in the distance diminishing to miniature like a picture. There is also the winding path through the woods. You turn this way and that, and perhaps undulate up and down. New objects burst continually on the view, and the eye must be busy to catch them. You wonder all the while what will come next, and where you shall come out, like as in the fortunes of a romance. Then when you at length emerge, the brighter light and the broad, clear lands seem like the happy conclusion of an uncertain story. By a cultivated relish for appearances of this sort, how might we lighten the tediousness of travel. How, catching words already quoted from the poet, we should find beauty waiting on our steps and pitching her tents before us as we move, an hourly neighbor. 21* CHAPTER VI. A DOMICILIARY SPECTACLE. "Me, oft has fancy, ludicrous and wild, Soothed with a waking dream of houses, towers, I gazed, myself creating what I saw." COWPER. WE have a poet's warrant for the first scene of this chapter; and if the reader has perused the observant and graphic Cowper, the rest will not be without interest, although the dear old bard has not painted it on his page. He loved almost every possible show in nature, and he who has caught the spirit of his muse will require of us no further apology. Twilight, and at the fireside; no lamp, no book, no work; need the space be lacking of interest to the solitary sitter? Let him watch the glow of the intensely ignited coals and realize the soothing waking dream. As the fire works round and through the fuel, how the eye, aided a little by fancy, perceives all sorts of fairy shows, a miniature theatre of shifting scenery. But the portraiture of our quotation suffices for this; so we pass to another. Suppose it bright day time, when hue and motion are more distinctly visible, there is the smoke, that accompaniment of flame, not particularly desirable for comfort or cookery, yet it is not undesirable as a spectacle of color, form and motion, to a child or anybody else. How mysteriously copious the vapor steals out from the apparently solid substance, of a whitish blue, from a green stick, curling and mingling with the darker blue of the drier. With what grace it turns, and twists, and bulges out its fleece after fleece, and then unrolls and shoots more straightly up through the flue. There is another smoke-scene from the chimneytop worth beholding. Take a still autumnal morning, with what stateliness the creature rises into a tall perpendicular column, as if it stood compact like a tree, yet every particle is in motion; then there is the spreading out and folding over at the summit like a canopy, sometimes the whole diversified with noticeable varieties of color in the sunlight. How often, when but a child, have we watched this ordinary exhibition. The eye would be caught by the wreathy wile, and be borne up and up till released by the unrolling of its fairy-like vehicle, when it would return down and be furled and wafted up again; then perhaps it would scud away and sport along a bank of the blue vapor piled in the lower air. No possible genius of the pencil could create that combined witchery of form, color and movement, on the canvass; yet it soars above the poor man's house as well as the rich man's, and might equallly amuse the children of |