We are too much encumbered with affairs, too busy, too active; we even
read too much. We must throw overboard all our cargo of anxieties,
preoccupations and pedantry to recover youth, simplicity, childhood, and
the present moment with its happy mood of gratitude. By that leisure
which is far from idleness, by an attentive and recollected inaction,
the soul loses her creases, expands, unfolds, repairs her injuries like
a bruised leaf, and becomes once more new, spontaneous, true, original
Reverie, like showers at night, refreshes the thoughts which have become
worn and discoloured by the heat of day.

I have been walking in the garden in a fine autumnal rain. All the
innumerable, wonderful symbols which the forms and colours of Nature
afford charm me and catch at my heart. There is no country scene that is
not a state of the soul, and whoever will read the two together will be
astonished by their detailed similarity. Far truer is true poetry than
science; poetry seizes at first glance in her synthetic way that
essential thing which all the sciences put together can only hope to
reach at the very end.


_Lessons from the Greeks_


How much we have to learn from our immortal forefathers, the Greeks; and
how far better than we did they solve their problem! Their type was not
ours, but how much better did they revere, cultivate and ennoble the man
they knew! Beside them we are barbarians in a thousand ways, as in
education, eloquence, public life, poetry, and the like. If the number
of its accomplished men be the measure of a civilization, ours is far
below theirs. We have not slaves beneath us, but we have them among us.