“All in a row Advancing broad, or wheeling round the field, While, as they rake the green-appearing ground, And drive the dusky wave along the mead, The russet haycock rises thick behind.” And my couch is one of these same pale hills that they have done with. My wife is away with the children: I shall not therefore run the risk of being buried, with shouts, under the piled heaps of the hay. My servant has gone out for a walk: I thus escape the apprehension of seeing her advance into my field steering among the haycocks, and, with hand shading her eyes, looking about all over its wide glare for me. I can lean on this arm until it is tired, then change to the other, then lie on my back and watch the fleecy blue, with handkerchief spread for fear of insects; then turn over again, and resume my inspection of the grass. I am thus particular in description, because I would fain carry my hay-field into hot London. A few distinct details may help out many a memory; and the clerk really in the baking, staring London street may yet, if his imagination be my ally, lean back among the yielding warm-breathed hay to muse with me upon the grass and its teachings. [Illustration] For it is, after all, impossible to be absolutely doing nothing. The mind, that busy alchemist, works on and works on in the worn laboratory of the body, and transmutes gold into earth, or earth into gold, as the case may be, in its peculiar crucible. And so, since I cannot but muse on the hay into which I am closely peering, I may as well also jot my musings down. * * * * * Flesh, and grass: how natural the now common-place connection between the short-lived beauty of the two! It is one of those commonplaces, however, which new thoughts could not easily better. The hay-fields, with their life and glee, and loveliness of flowers just now, and now these faded mounds! The generations of men in the gaiety or toil of the world, and then the churchyard with its “shadowed swells”! Half a year for the one growth, and sometimes less, sometimes more, for the other; but all lying in the bending swathes at last. Take the extreme case: “All the days of Methuselah were nine hundred sixty and nine years.” Was flesh like grass then? What! a thousand years akin to the life of a few months? Yes, closely akin; banded together by the last words of the life of both; for how ends the short history of the longest liver of mortal men? “----_and he died._” Yea, the growth, the ripening was longer in progress, but the scythe came at last: “The voice said, Cry. And he said, What shall I cry? All flesh is grass,--and all the goodliness thereof is as the flower of the field; The grass withereth, the flower fadeth.” And again: “Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble. He cometh forth like a flower, and is cut down: He fleeth also as a shadow, and continueth not.”