This delight, which children, busy men, and weary age alike find in out-of-door life, may be said to be merely physical, a thing of the nerves and animal spirits. It is so, no doubt, but it is something more. Along with pleasure to the senses, there enters in something more ethereal, not the less real because it may be undefinable. This fresh child-like delight in Nature has found expression abundantly in the poets, especially in those of the early time. Chaucer, before all others, is full of it. As one sample out of many, take this. In the Prologue to “The Legend of Good Women,” he tells that he has such love to the daisy that— “When comen is the May, Then in my bed there daweth me no day That I n’am up and walking in the mead, To see this flower against the sunné spread, When it upriseth early in the morrow; That blissful sight softeneth all my sorrow; So glad am I when that I have presénce Of it, to doen it all reverence, As she that is of all flow’rs the flow’r.” Then he goes on to describe himself kneeling down on the sod to greet the daisy when it first opens:— “And down on knees anon right I me set, And as I could this freshé flow’r I grette, Kneeling always till it unclosed was Upon the small, and soft, and sweeté gras.” So we see Chaucer has been beforehand with Burns, not to say Wordsworth, in tender affection for the daisy. The same transparent expression of delight in the open-air world comes in unexpectedly in some of the old ballads, which are concerned with far other matters. Thus:— ... “When leaves be large and long It’s pleasant walking in good greenwood To hear the small birds’ song. The woodweel sang and would not cease, Sitting upon the spray, So loud he wakened Robin Hood, In greenwood where he lay.” Suchlike utterances of ballad-writers and early poets might be multiplied without number. It is a penalty we have to pay for our late and over-stimulated civilization that such direct and unreflecting expressions of gladness in the face of Nature seem hardly any longer possible for a poet. If he will be listened to by our jaded, sophisticated ears, it is not enough for him to utter once again the spontaneous gladness that human hearts feel, and always will feel, in the pleasant air and the sunshine; he must say something about it which shall be novel, and out of the way, something subtle or analytic, or strongly stimulative. And yet it cannot but be that a poet who has a heart keenly sensitive to the common sights of earth and sky, and who describes these with the direct freshness which feeling heart and clear eye always give, may still do much to win back men from over-subtilizing, and to make them feel as if they have never felt before—