“How many beautiful pictures have I seen emerge from a cloud of dust upon a country road! How many of those pictures have again been half obliterated by the dust of after-years, only to be recalled to life by even so trivial a thing as the bleating of a lamb, the ring of a boyish laugh, or the homely music of the falling pasture bars! “Pity for him whose heart knows no such sensitive and latent chord of sympathy to yield its harmony along the way, lending an inspiration to the present, while sanctifying the past, and drawing from its better memories a renewed delight in living! There is no walk in life, however dull or prosaic, no circumstance so commonplace, that they can stifle this ever-present melody. It sings in unison with nature in a thousand different keys--in a falling leaf or a cricket’s song. The rain-drops of to-day but repeat the old-time patter on the garret-roof. The noisy katydid, whenever heard, is that same untiring nightly visitant outside your window to whose perpetual whim you loved to listen, and in fancy tantalize until you dropped off to sleep upon your pillow. This skimming swallow sailing near will never cross your path but so surely will he fly to those same old nests beneath the barn-yard eaves. If there is ever a blessed mood ‘most musical, most melancholy,’ it may be found beneath the refining influence of just such reminiscences; for whether or not there are added elements of home association, there are always a legion of indelible memories that love to linger along the country road and lane--highways and byways beloved of fancy--paths of recollection filled with footprints which not even the tempest can obliterate.” One rarely finds a profounder analysis of the true mean between breadth and detail, between effect and incident, nor a truer affirmation of one of the neglected sources of power in translating the larger aspects of the world than in the following: “‘There is as much finish in the right concealment of things as in the right exhibition of them.’ “Here is a key to the very heart of nature, if one will only use it. And I would but add my faint echo in an entreaty for a deeper sense of the infinity of nature’s living tone and palpitating color--a plea for the more intelligent recognition of the elements that yield the tint which we vainly strive to imitate upon the canvas. Such knowledge will give a voice to every pigment on the palette, and to the brush an answering consciousness; for, whether disciple of a school or not, whether artist, poet, or layman, who can deny that such an attitude toward nature shall yield a harvest of deeper knowledge, and increased delight, not merely in the contemplation of the footprint, but even as truly in the study of the limitless panorama?