the energies of such bracing action; but more animating still is it to
live so as to breast the stress of time.

Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the time and
enlarge the capacity of the day--our poor day that so easily shrinks and
dwindles in the careless possession of idle minds. The date, every first
of March, for example, may sweep upon a large curve and come home
annually after a swinging flight. To the infinite variety of natural
days may be entrusted half the work of strengthening the flight against
time, but the other half must be the task of the vehement heart. Nature
assuredly does not fail. Days, seasons, and years are as wide asunder as
the unforeseen can set them, and a crowd of children is not more various.
But the resisting heart seems of late to be somewhat lacking. We are
inclined to turn our heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon the
gates of the wind, and to go the smooth road.

We are even precipitate, and whip our way faster on the time-killing
course than the natural event would take us. It is not enough that we
should run helplessly, we outstrip the breeze and outsail the current
with the ease of our untimely luxuries. Our daffodils are no longer to
have the praise of their daring, for we no longer relate them to the
lagging swallow. By the time the barely budding woods give a poor man's
lodging to the cold daffodil--a scanty kind taking the wind with a short
stalk and giving it but small petals to buffet--we have already said
farewell to the tall and splendid green-house daffodil that never braved
the cold. We gave to this our untimely welcome long before the snowdrop
came, and the golden name of daffodil has lost its vernal sound. And
when we part with the improved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardly
know or care whether the starveling is yet mustering in hollows of
woodlands, or whether it is over or to come. We are attending to a