greenfinch in the hawthorn yonder has been there since I came out,
and all the time has been happily talking to his love. He has left
the hawthorn indeed, but only for a minute or two, to fetch a few
seeds, and comes back each time more full of song-talk than ever.
He notes no slow movement of the oak's shadow on the grass; it is
nothing to him and his lady dear that the sun, as seen from his
nest, is crossing from one great bough of the oak to another. The
dew even in the deepest and most tangled grass has long since been
dried, and some of the flowers that close at noon will shortly fold
their petals. The morning airs, which breathe so sweetly, come
less and less frequently as the heat increases. Vanishing from the
sky, the last fragments of cloud have left an untarnished azure.
Many times the bees have returned to their hives, and thus the
index of the day advances. It is nothing to the greenfinches; all
their thoughts are in their song-talk. The sunny moment is to them
all in all. So deeply are they rapt in it that they do not know
whether it is a moment or a year. There is no clock for feeling,
for joy, for love.

And with all their motions and stepping from bough to bough, they
are not restless; they have so much time, you see. So, too, the
whitethroat in the wild parsley; so, too, the thrush that just now
peered out and partly fluttered his wings as he stood to look. A
butterfly comes and stays on a leaf - a leaf much warmed by the sun
- and shuts his wings. In a minute he opens them, shuts them
again, half wheels round, and by-and-by - just when he chooses, and
not before - floats away. The flowers open, and remain open for
hours, to the sun. Hastelessness is the only word one can make up
to describe it; there is much rest, but no haste. Each moment, as
with the greenfinches, is so full of life that it seems so long and