It has been the habit of poets to surround simple pleasures and pursuits with the golden atmosphere of romance,--not because they would enjoy such pleasures and pursuits at all, but rather because they are forever beyond their possession. A poet is always reaching toward the unattainable, and he may reach forward to the perfections of a life of which the best that he sees around him is an intimation, or backward to the animal content of a life as yet undisturbed by the intimation of something better. Bucolics are very sweet, but their writers do not believe in them. "A nut-brown maid," with bare, unconscious feet and ancles, is very pretty in a picture, but the man who painted her ascertained that she was green, and not the most entertaining of companions. The truth is, that when we have got along so far that we can perceive that which is poetical and picturesque in the simplest form of rustic life, we have got too far along to enjoy it. I suppose that much of the charm which simple animal content has for us, is connected with the memories of childhood. We can all recall a period of our lives when there was joy in the consciousness of living--when animal life, in its spontaneous overflow, flooded all our careless hours with its own peculiar pleasure. The light was pleasant to our eyes, vigorous appetite and digestion made ambrosia of the homeliest fare, the simplest play brought delight, and life--all untried--lay spread out before us in one long, golden dream. We now watch our children at their sports, and see but little difference between their sources of happiness and those which supply the kittens in their play. "Pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw," they skip from pleasure to pleasure, and find delight in the impulsive exercise of their little powers. We were once like them. Life was once as fresh, and flowing, and impulsive, and objectless, as it is with them; and when we are weary and oppressed with labor, and loaded down with responsibility, and filled with thoughts of the great destiny before us, we turn our eyes backward with a sigh for days once ours, but lost forever. Lost forever! This is the romantic pain that fills us in all our contemplations of simple animal content. It is lost to us, because we are lost to it. Like a passenger far out upon the sea, adventuring upon a long voyage, we look back upon the fading hills of our native land, and sigh to think that the breeze which bears us away can never bring us back.