Let me sit down under this network of sycamore and chesnut boughs, while the faint patches of pale sunlight move about me on the rank and drenched, yet ungrowing grass; let me sit down under the bare boughs, while the brown, wet, marred leaves huddle by the side of the garden seat, and under the barred plank that serves as my footstool. I dare say my old and unfailing friend will soon come and perch near me, his lover, and match the sad cheery gleams of sunlight with sad cheery gleams of song. Bird of the mild dark loving eye, and quick quiet motion, and olive plumage, and warm sienna-red breast; bird of the soft song,--passion subdued now to tenderness, hope that has sunk to patience, eagerness that is merged in tranquillity,--faithful bird, whose every tone and motion, familiar and loved, seems to fit the Winter heart as well as the Spring fancy,--those fervent, passionate songsters of the Spring, that now are flown, they never drowned to my ear thy quiet song of peace; no, not even in the days when the nightingale’s thrilling utterance made the world as it were full of the unsubstantial beauty of a dream. And so now I feel a sort of right to the calm and comfort of thy tranquil, unfailing utterance, when the evanescent dream has passed away, and the disenchanted world stands naked. Thus, while you are young, O my friends, and all the boughs are clothed, and all the birds are singing, and your heart makes answer to the loveliness and the music,--do not disdain, then, to listen to and to heed that quieter voice which tells, in an undertone, very beautiful, if attended to, of the love of God. Your heart, if you knew it, cannot really afford to dispense with it when all the woods are loud, “and all the trees are green.” And if you _did_ hear and heed and love it then, ah, how exquisite, how refreshing, how more than cheering the faithful notes appear, as you sit meditating under a pale winter sky, and looking at silent, leafless boughs,--and the songster draws nearer to you then, finding you alone! * * * * * Well, let me, I say, sit me down on this garden seat, under these “bare ruined choirs,” and hail the one little chorister, whose quiet, modest song ever seems to me to compensate for the absence of all the rest. The dewdrops twinkle about me in the drenched grass, groups of brown toadstools cluster here and there, and wax-white fungi straggle away in a broken line; there is a scarlet gleam of hips in the rose-bushes under the shrubbery, and of mountain-ash higher above them. It is Winter, but nature has not forgotten to stick some sprays of Christmas about her bare pillars, and to twist them in devices about her arches, that run up around me into this groined roof above.