1864 341 read with rapture Captain Marryat's Percival Keene, Snarley-yoWy Mr. Midshipman Easy, but they afford me no raptures now. I love better and finer work. When I was a boy, I heard the cuckoo with joy and thrill of heart, not for its own sake, but for the promise of multiplication of threepenny bits. Now I love it for its note alone. When I was a young man I picked the bugloss and regretted that it was not borage, wherewith to flavour cider-cup. Now I stand by the hedge and drink in the loveliness of the blue, profound as an Italian sky, without any aspiration after cider-cup, and disappointment because bugloss is not borage. The contemplation of past joys affords, at least to me, no regrets at all, only hope, and more than hope, confidence. In my advanced old age I really entertain more delight in the beauties of Nature and of Art than I did in my youth. Appreciation of what is good and true and comely grows with years, and this growth, I feel sure, is no more to be quenched by death than is the life of the caddis-worm when it breaks forth as the mayfly. Perhaps the sense of the beautiful in the child is mingled with wonder as to what it all means, in the adult it is appreciated for what it is worth. To the old its great charm is in that it is expectant. Consequently, I do not look back, like Jefferies, upon the past and say, " All is dead ! " What I repeat in my heart, as I watch the buds unfold, and the cuckoo-flowers quivering in the meadow, and I inhale the scent of the pines in the forest, and hear the spiral song of the lark, is " All is Promise."
