The heroes and heroines of Homer used to eat and drink all day till the setting sun;[54] and by dint of industry, contrived to finish that important business by the usual period at which modern beaux and belles begin it—who are, therefore, necessitated, like Penelope, to sit up all night; not, indeed, to destroy the works of the day, for how can nothing be annihilated? This does not apply to all our party, and we hope not to many of our readers. CHAPTER XX THE SEA-SHORE They stopped the next evening at a village on the sea-shore. The wind rose in the night, but without rain. Mr. Forester was up before the sun, and descending to the beach, found Anthelia there before him, sitting on a rock, and listening to the dash of the waves, like a Nereid to Triton’s shell. _Mr. Forester._ You are an early riser, Miss Melincourt. _Anthelia._ I always was so. The morning is the infancy of the day, and, like the infancy of life, has health and bloom, and cheerfulness and purity, in a degree unknown to the busy noon, which is the season of care, or the languid evening, which is the harbinger of repose. Perhaps the song of the nightingale is not in itself less cheerful than that of the lark: it is the season of her song that invests it with the character of melancholy.[55] It is the same with the associations of infancy: it is all cheerfulness, all hope: its path is on the flowers of an untried world. The daisy has more beauty in the eye of childhood than the rose in that of maturer life. The spring is the infancy of the year: its flowers are the flowers of promise and the darlings of poetry. The autumn, too, has its flowers; but they are little loved, and little praised: for the associations of autumn are not with ideas of cheerfulness, but with yellow leaves and hollow winds, heralds of winter and emblems of dissolution. _Mr. Forester._ These reflections have more in them of the autumn than of the morning. But the mornings of autumn participate in the character of the season. _Anthelia._ They do so; yet even in mists and storms the opening must be always more cheerful than the closing day. _Mr. Forester._ But this morning is fine and clear, and the wind blows over the sea. Yet this, to me at least, is not a cheerful scene. _Anthelia._ Nor to me. But our long habits of association with the sound of the winds and the waters have given them to us a voice of melancholy majesty: a voice not audible by those little children who are playing yonder on the shore. To them all scenes are cheerful. It is the morning of life: it is infancy that makes them so.