a short stalk and giving it but small petals to buffet—­we have already said farewell to the tall and splendid green-house daffodil that never braved the cold.  We gave to this our untimely welcome long before the snowdrop came, and the golden name of daffodil has lost its vernal sound.  And when we part with the improved creature, lofty and enlarged, we hardly know or care whether the starveling is yet mustering in hollows of woodlands, or whether it is over or to come.  We are attending to a yellower tulip, no doubt, when the only daffodil that Shakespeare knew is opening in the chilly wood.

The reproach is a commonplace, but perhaps we have generally accused ourselves of the impatience rather than of the listlessness, and have not noted how we shorten the disarranged seasons and lay up for ourselves memories confused and undefined.  Late springs and early, gentle and hard, are compelled to yield the same colours; haste has its way and its revenges.  If we are resolved to live quickly, why, nothing is easier.  There are no such brief days as those that are indistinct; and the sliding on the way of time is, of all habits, the most tyrannously careless.  It is first a laxity, then a habit, and next a folly; and when we keep neither Ash Wednesday nor the birthday of daffodils, and have hardly felt the cold, and do not know where the sun rises, we are already on the way of least resistance, the friction of life is gone; and in our last old age the past will seem to dwindle even like the dwindled present of our decline.

There has been one unconscious operation of the love of life, one single grasp after variety, intended to save the year, to face it, to meet it, to compel it to show a unique face and bear a name of its own; and this is travel.  It is the finest and most effectual flight against time of all.  What elastic days are those wherein I make head against a travelling landscape, meet histories and boundaries, hail frontiers, face a new manner of building, cross the regions of silver roofs and of heavy Alpine stone, and bring with me the late light upon billowy gables and red eaves!  And how buoyant the week in which I anticipate the sun upon the roofless east!  How serried are the days with forests, how enlarged by plains, how thronged by cities, how singled by the pine, how newly audible by a new sea!  Far was the sunrise from the sunset, and noon is one memorable midday with shortened shadows upon some solitary road.

Our fathers had friction of another kind:  hardship at home, winters and nights that were dark with a darkness we have abolished; springs that brought an infinite releasing, illumination, and recolouring.  None of us has seen the sight, or breathed the air, or heard those emancipated voices.  The bloom, the birds, the ifted sky!  Bright nights and glowing houses have surely robbed us of that variety, and all these untimely fruits and flowers have suppressed even the small privations of a winter in disguise.