main subject of it. It came thus: he thought how glad the bees
would be when their crop of heather was ripe; then he thought how
they preferred the heather to the flowers; then, that the one must
taste nicer to them than the other; and last awoke the question
whether their taste of sweet was the same as his. "For," said he,
"if their honey is sweet to them with the same sweetness with which
it is sweet to me, then there is something in the make of the bee
that's the same with the make of me; and perhaps then a man might
some day, if he wanted, try the taste of being a bee all out for a
little while." But to see him, nobody would have thought he was
doing anything but basking in the sun. The scents of the flowers
all about his feet came and went on the eddies of the air, paying
my lord many a visit in his antechamber, his brain; the windy
noises of the insects, the watery noises of the pigeons, the noises
from the poultry yard, the song of the mountain river, visited, him
also through the portals of his ears; but at the moment, the boy
seemed lost in the mere fundamental satisfaction of existence.

Neither, although broad summer was on the earth, and all the
hill-tops, and as much of the valleys as their shadows did not
hide, were bathed in sunlight, although the country was his native
land, and he loved it with the love of his country's poets, was the
consciousness of the boy free from a certain strange kind of
trouble connected with, if not resulting from the landscape before
him. A Celt through many of his ancestors, and his mother in
particular, his soul, full of undefined emotion, was aware of an
ever recurring impulse to song, ever checked and broken, ever
thrown back upon itself. There were a few books in the house,
amongst them certain volumes of verse--a copy of Cowly, whose
notable invocation of Light he had instinctively blundered upon;