In vain I have pondered the Stoic virtues.  I know that it is folly to fret about the spot of one’s abode on this little earth.

   All places that the eye of heaven visits
   Are to the wise man ports and happy havens.

But I have always worshipped wisdom afar off.  In the sonorous period of the philosopher, in the golden measure of the poet, I find it of all things lovely.  To its possession I shall never attain.  What will it serve me to pretend a virtue of which I am incapable?  To me the place and manner of my abode is of supreme import; let it be confessed, and there an end of it.  I am no cosmopolite.  Were I to think that I should die away from England, the thought would be dreadful to me.  And in England, this is the dwelling of my choice; this is my home.

III.

I am no botanist, but I have long found pleasure in herb-gathering.  I love to come upon a plant which is unknown to me, to identify it with the help of my book, to greet it by name when next it shines beside my path.  If the plant be rare, its discovery gives me joy.  Nature, the great Artist, makes her common flowers in the common view; no word in human language can express the marvel and the loveliness even of what we call the vulgarest weed, but these are fashioned under the gaze of every passer-by.  The rare flower is shaped apart, in places secret, in the Artist’s subtler mood; to find it is to enjoy the sense of admission to a holier precinct.  Even in my gladness I am awed.

To-day I have walked far, and at the end of my walk I found the little white-flowered wood-ruff.  It grew in a copse of young ash.  When I had looked long at the flower, I delighted myself with the grace of the slim trees about it—­their shining smoothness, their olive hue.  Hard by stood a bush of wych elm; its tettered bark, overlined as if with the character of some unknown tongue, made the young ashes yet more beautiful.

It matters not how long I wander.  There is no task to bring me back; no one will be vexed or uneasy, linger I ever so late.  Spring is shining upon these lanes and meadows; I feel as if I must follow every winding track that opens by my way.  Spring has restored to me something of the long-forgotten vigour of youth; I walk without weariness; I sing to myself like a boy, and the song is one I knew in boyhood.

That reminds me of an incident.  Near a hamlet, in a lonely spot by a woodside, I came upon a little lad of perhaps ten years old, who, his head hidden in his arms against a tree trunk, was crying bitterly.  I asked him what was the matter, and, after a little trouble—­he was better than a mere bumpkin—­I learnt that, having been sent with sixpence to pay a debt, he had lost the money.  The poor little fellow was in a state of mind which in a grave man would be called the anguish of despair; he must have been crying for a long time; every muscle in his face quivered as if under torture, his limbs shook; his eyes, his voice, uttered such misery as only the vilest criminal should be made to suffer.  And it was because he had lost sixpence!