We are in one of the pretty lanes of England. The smoke of a great city is beginning to curl up into the morning skies, but the sounds of that wakening Babylon cannot reach us in our green seclusion. As we step along lightly, cheerily, in the cool sunlight, hark to the glad voices of children; and lo! a cottage-home, sweeter-looking than any we have yet passed. Honeysuckles and jessamine wreathe the wooden trellis of the porch with verdure and flowers. In those flowers the early bee is hanging and humming, birds are chirping aloft, and cherubs are singing below. An urchin, with his yellow curls half-blinding his big blue eyes, sits on the sunny gravelwalk, playing with a frisky, red-collared kitten. On the steps of the door, beneath the shade of the trellis-work, sit two girls, a lapful of white roses before them, which they are gathering into a bouquet, or sticking into each other’s hair. What are they singing? Come, come, come! Oh, the merry Summer morn! From dewy slumbers breaking, Birds and flowers are waking. Come, come, come! and leave our beds forlorn! Hark, hark, hark! I hear our playmates call! Hurrah! for merry rambles! Morn is the time for gambols. Yes, yes, yes! Let’s go a-roving all! Haste, haste, haste! To woodland dells away! There flowers for us are springing, And little birds are singing— “Come, come, come! Good-morrow! come away!” A wiseacre lately remarked, as a proof of the _sober sense_ of the age, that no one now sang about the happiness of childhood! _Sombre_ sense, he should have said,—if he misused the word “sense” at all. No happiness,—nay, no peculiar happiness in childhood! Does he mean to maintain that we get happier as we get older?—that life, at the age of Methuselah, is as joyous as at fifteen? Has novelty, which charms in all the details of existence, no charm in existence itself? Is suspicion—that infallible growth of years, that baneful result of knowledge of the world—no damper on happiness? Is innocence nothing? Is _ennui_ known to the young? No, no! Youth is the summer of life; it is the very heyday of joy,—the poetry of existence. Youth beholds everything through a golden medium,—through the prism of fancy, not in the glass of reason; in the rose hue of idealism, not the naked forms that we call reality. “All that’s bright must fade, The brightest still the fleetest!”