“George,” said Thorsby, “how I do envy you your philosophical contempt for the pleasures of gay society, for you seem to enjoy what you do like with such a genuine gusto.” “But it is no merit, my dear fellow,” George would reply; “for all those things that you call jollities and gaieties are my aversion. To spring out of bed on a summer’s morning, and see the sun shining over the beauteous landscape, steaming and smoking in the ascending dew; to hear the cuckoo calling me in her quaint foreign tongue, the thrushes and blackbirds shouting out their delight, some scores of them, as if they had not hearts big enough for their joy; to hear all the varied sounds of life, from the larks in the sky, from the creatures in the yard; to see the cattle and the flocks all luxuriating in the green or golden fields; to hear human voices making up the concert of nature, and, above all, the merry tongue of Letty, and the grave, loving tones of Ann, already out in the garden; to mount my horse, and ride away through fields and woods amid all the gladness of heaven and earth; to feel the fulness of life beating in my veins and gushing through my heart—Ah! what are all your simpering fine people, and your candle-light companies to me! Thorsby, I see men solitarily passing their lives in the lonely fields, or felling and fagoting in the lonely woods, whose very existence will never be known beyond their own hamlet; and do you think they are miserable? I tell you, no—so long as they can earn a decent reward for their labour. I often talk with these men, the Crusoes of the fields, of whom you fine people never think, or value them more than the sheep which graze beside them, and I find that God has breathed into them, frequently, in His silent language, of the sun, the moon, and stars, of the whispering breezes of evening, the colours of the sky, and the odours of turf and forest—things the haunters of crowds and lamplit festivities never dream of. These humble creatures, amid all their ignorance, in all their unvalued life, go home at night to loving hearts, and taste a happiness in communion with a few loved objects, which never can come to those whose affections are dissipated by running over countless forms and faces without settling on any. I would rather be one of these poor, despised, unknown, uncared-for creatures than the finest, wealthiest man or woman who lives the mere life of fashion and conventionalism. “Our philosophical poet Wordsworth has exactly hit my idea of the philosophy of existence:— “‘Yet life, you say, is life; we have seen and see, And with a living pleasure we describe; And fits of sprightly malice do but bribe The languid mind into activity. Sound sense, and love itself, and mirth and glee, Are fostered by the comment and the gibe. Even be it so: yet still among your tribe, Our daily world’s true worldlings, rank not me.