But the real reason of the slight shadow that had fallen on my spirit was the vanished hawthorn.  Poor sentimentalist, you say, to cherish these idle fancies in this stern world of blood and tears.  Well, perhaps it is this stern world of blood and tears that gives these idle fancies their poignancy.  Perhaps it is through those fancies that one feels the transitoriness of other things.  The coming and the parting in the round of nature are so wonderfully mingled that we can never be quite sure whether the joy of the one triumphs over the regret for the other.  It is always “Hail” and “Farewell” in one breath.  I heard the cuckoo calling across the meadows to-day, and already I noticed a faltering in his second note.  Soon the second note will be silent altogether, and the single call will sound over the valley like the curfew bell of spring.

Who, I thought, would not fix these fleeting moments of beauty if he could?  Who would not keep the cuckoo’s twin shout floating for ever over summer fields and the blackbird for ever fluting his thanksgiving after summer showers?  Who can see the daffodils nodding their heads in sprightly dance without sharing the mood of Herrick’s immortal lament that that dance should be so brief:—­

    Fair daffodils, we weep to see
    You haste away so soon;
    As yet the early-rising sun
    Has not attain’d its noon. 
    Stay, stay. 
    Until the hasting day
    Has run
    But to the evensong;
    And, having prayed together, we
    Will go with you along.

Yes, I think Herrick would have forgiven me for that momentary lapse into regretfulness over the white hawthorn.  He would have understood.  You will see that he understood if you will recall the second stanza, which, if you are the person I take you for, you will do without needing to turn to a book.

It is the same sense of the transience of beauty that inspired the “Ode to a Grecian Urn” on which pastoral beauty was fixed in eternal rapture:—­

    Ah, happy, happy boughs I that cannot shed
    Your leaves, nor ever bid the spring adieu.

And there we touch the paradox of this strange life.  We would keep the fleeting beauty of Nature, and yet we would not keep it.  The thought of those trees whose leaves are never shed, and of that eternal spring to which we never bid adieu, is pleasant to toy with, but after all we would not have it so.  It is no more seriously tenable than the thought that little Johnny there should remain for ever at the age of ten.  You may feel that you would like him to remain at the age of ten.  Indeed you are a strange parent if you do not look back a little wistfully to the childhood of your children, and wish you could see them as you once saw them.  But you would not really have Johnny stick at ten.  After five years of the experience you would wish little Johnny dead.  For life and its beauty are a living thing, and not a pretty fancy sculptured on a Grecian urn.