mid-day. It is charitably to be said that their practice was better than
their precept--or their poetry. Thomson, the author of "The Castle of
Indolence," who gave birth to the depraved apostrophe,

"Falsely luxurious, will not man awake,"

was one of the laziest men of his century. He customarily lay in bed
until noon meditating pentameters on sunrise. This creature used to be
seen in his garden of an afternoon, with both hands in his waistcoat
pockets, eating peaches from a pendent bough. Nearly all the English
poets who at that epoch celebrated what they called "the effulgent orb
of day" were denizens of London, where pure sunshine is unknown eleven
months out of the twelve.

In a great city there are few incentives to early rising. What charm is
there in roof-tops and chimney-stacks to induce one to escape even
from a nightmare? What is more depressing than a city street before the
shop-windows have lifted an eyelid, when "the very houses seem asleep,"
as Wordsworth says, and nobody is astir but the belated burglar or the
milk-and-water man or Mary washing off the front steps? Daybreak at
the seaside or up among the mountains is sometimes worth while, though
familiarity with it breeds indifference. The man forced by restlessness
or occupation to drink the first vintage of the morning every day of
his life has no right appreciation of the beverage, however much he may
profess to relish it. It is only your habitual late riser who takes in
the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to
go a-fishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the
sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky. For him--a momentary
Adam--the world is newly created. It is Eden come again, with Eve in the
similitude of a three-pound trout.