Rise with the sun, if you would keep the commandments. The sleep you get before midnight goes to virtue; after sunrise, to vice. "It is wise," says Aristotle, "to be up before daybreak, for such habit contributes to health, wealth, and wisdom." If this virtue, commended alike by antiquity and by our sense of self-respect, has fallen into discredit in modern times, it was practised by our forefathers and bore its fruits. They "With much shorter and far sweeter sleep content, Vigorous and fresh about their labors went." "He that in the morning hath heard the voice of virtue," says Confucius, "may die at night." And it were virtuous to rise early during our June mornings to breakfast on strawberries with the robins, or what were as good, partake of Leigh Hunt's delicious Essay on these berries. One tastes them from his potted pages. And his very quotations are palatable. "My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holburn, I saw good strawberries in your garden there; I pray you send for some of them." An ancient may read "Concord" instead of "my Lord of Ely's" gardens, and enjoy the sight moreover of his grandson's vermilioned fingers while picking them; the berries in no wise inferior to his Lordship's in flavor or color, and far larger in size,--that Yankee superstition. But one tastes none like the wild ones plucked fresh from the meadows of his native place, while the dews sparkled in the grasses, and the bobolink sought to decoy him from her nest there when he approached it. The lay lingers in the ear still:-- "A single note, so sweet and low, Like a full heart's overflow, Forms the prelude,--but the strain Gives us no sweet tone again; For the wild and saucy song Leaps and skips the notes among With such quick and sportive play, Ne'er was merrier, madder lay." Herrick dished his with fresh cream from his "little buttery":-- "You see the cream but naked is, Nor dances in the eye Without a strawberry, Or some fine tincture like to this Which draws the sight thereto." So Milton's Eve in Eden,-- "From many a berry and from sweet kernels pressed, She tempered dulcet creams." And Aratus, whom St. Paul quotes concerning the gods, calls the berries in aid in describing the roseate cheek of health:-- "Fair flesh like snow with vermilion mixed," a line that took Goethe's fancy when composing his Theory of Colors. Randolph, too, Ben Jonson's young friend, rides out of London with "worthy Stafford" in quest of some,-- "Come, spur away, I have no patience for a longer stay; But I must go down And leave the changeable air of this great town. I will the country see, Where old simplicity, Though hid in gray, Doth look more gay Than foppery in plush and scarlet clad; Farewell ye city wits that are Almost at city war,-- 'Tis time that I grew wise when all the world is mad.