from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men’s heads and unobserved by them.  We see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows.  The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature’s red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present.  He is blessed over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering the past.  Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated.  That sound commonly reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of thought.  His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours.  There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,—­the gospel according to this moment.  He has not fallen astern; he has got up early, and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time.  It is an expression of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,—­healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time.  Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed.  Who has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird’s strain is in its freedom from all plaintiveness.  The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter, but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy?  When, in doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, “There is one of us well, at any rate,”—­and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November.  I was walking in a meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams.  It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of that meadow.  When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more glorious still.