The criminal reprieved—­the child, hopeless and despairing at the suffering parent’s bed, and blessed at length with a firm promise of amendment and recovery, can tell the feelings that sustained my fluttering heart, beating more anxiously the nearer it approached its home.  I woke that morning with the lark—­yes, ere that joyous bird had spread its wing, and broke upon the day with its mad note—­and I left the doctor’s house whilst all within were sleeping.  There was no rest for me away from that abode, whose gates of adamant, with all their bars and fastenings, one magic word had opened—­whose sentinels were withdrawn—­whose terrors had departed.  The hours were all too long until I claimed my newfound privilege.  Morn of the mellow summer, how beautiful is thy birth!  How soft—­how calm—­how breathlessly and blushingly thou stealest upon a slumbering world! fearful, as it seems, of startling it.  How deeply quiet, and how soothing, are thy earliest sounds—­scarce audible—­by no peculiar quality distinguishable, yet thrilling and intense!  How doubly potent falls thy witching influence on him whose spirit passion has attuned to all the harmonies of earth, and made but too susceptible!  Disturbed as I was by the anticipation of my joy, and by the consequent unrest, with the first sight of day, and all its charms, came peace—­actual and profound.  The agitation of my soul was overwhelmed by the prevailing stillness, and I grew tranquil and subdued.  Love existed yet—­what could extinguish that?—­but heightened and sublimed.  It was as though, in contemplating the palpable and lovely work of heaven, all selfishness had at once departed from my breast—­all dross had separated from my best affections, and left them pure and free.  And so I walked on, happiest of the happy, from field to field, from hill to hill, with no companion on the way, no traveller within my view—­alone with nature and my heart’s delight.  “And men pent up in cities,” thought I, as I went along, “would call this—­solitude.”  I remembered how lonely I had felt in the busy crowds of London—­how chill, how desolate and forlorn, and marvelled at the reasoning of man.  And came no other thoughts of London and the weary hours passed there, as I proceeded on my delightful walk?  Yes, many, as Heaven knows, who heard the involuntary matin prayer, offered in gratefulness of heart, upon my knees, and in the open fields, where no eye but one could look upon the worshipper, and call the fitness of the time and place in question.  The early mowers were soon a-foot; they saluted me and passed.  Then, from the humblest cottages issued the straight thin column of white smoke—­white as the snowy cloud—­telling of industry within, and the return of toil.  Now labourers were busy in their garden plots, labouring for pleasure and delight, ere they strove abroad for hire, their children at their side, giving the utmost of their small help—­young, ruddy, wild, and earnest workmen all!  The country day is up some hours before the day in town.  Life sleeps in cities, whilst it moves in active usefulness away from them.  The hills were dotted with the forms of men before I reached the parsonage, and when I reached it, a golden lustre from the mounting sun lit up the lovely house with fire—­streaming through the casements already opened to the sweet and balmy air.