On such a day as this, it would be supreme delight to eat lotus in the woods; to lie, stretched prone upon the grass, in the grateful shade, with no heavier task than to watch a sluggish beetle, or an ant carrying its burden, in imminent danger of collision with every tiny stalk; to listen to all the sounds in nature's orchestra, the stringed instruments of the insects floating in the air, and the reeds of the insects crawling in the grass, the flutes of the birds, the horns of the wind blowing through the tree-tops, and all those sweet, indefinable sounds you only hear when your ear is close to the ground, but which play their part in the grand symphony; to lie upon the grass, with not a sound from the great world jarring upon your Arcadia; to dream of Satyrs, and Fauns, and wood-nymphs, and water-nymphs, and the great god Pan, piping upon his pastoral reeds; to think of absent friends who are thinking of you, and will return, and of absent friends who are thinking of you, but will never return, as no road leads back from that country whither they have journeyed, and the daisies tell no stories, nor even the rustle of the grass which grows above them; to remember a chord of music long forgotten, and let its subtle melancholy weave a vision in the Past, when the chord was a sound and not a sigh, and the vision was a reality and not a shadow. And to let the little bugs crawl in your ear and shiver the whole beautiful Dream-Fabric. June 13, 1868. _THE GERMANS AND MUSIC._ To make a good German, four things are requisite, viz: Music, beer, Rhine wine and _Gemuethlichkeit_. In regard to the first and last qualities, I think that I am half a German. For four days past, I have been trying to achieve the other two qualities, and thus Teutonize myself _in toto_. I have fought the white beer of Berlin with an energy worthy of a better cause. I have wrestled with the red beer of Chicago. I have struggled with Hocheimer, Rudesheimer and Johannisberg, until I was Black, White and Red in the face, and hung out the German flag in my countenance. I have wished, with Mein Herr Von Dunk, that my trough was as deep as the rolling Zuyder Zee. But when I had accomplished my fifth glass of the mantling beer with internal satisfaction, and then beheld a German friend call for his thirtieth, just by way of an appetizer for the half barrel he had ordered, I saw at once the futility of my undertaking. In fact, I was not equal to the beer capacity of a small German baby, and when I saw great, jolly Teutons, flaxen-haired, deep-lunged and stout-handed, with a whole case of Rhenish hidden away under their jackets, is it proper for me to allude to the poor little bottle of Steinberger I had demolished, or to have any other feeling in regard to that feat than one of intense mortification? The spirit was willing, but the flesh was weak. Nature was against me.