Still cheerily the chickadee
Singeth to me on fence and tree:
But in my inmost ear is heard
The music of a holier bird;
And heavenly thoughts, as soft and white
As snow-flakes, on my soul alight,
Clothing with love my lonely heart,
Healing with peace each bruised part,
Till all my being seems to be
Transfigured by their purity.
* * * * *
EASE IN WORK.
To thoughts and expressions of peculiar force and beauty we give the
epithets "happy" and "felicitous," as if we esteemed them a product
rather of the writer's fortune than of his toil. Thus, Dryden says of
Shakspeare, "All the images of Nature were still present to him, and he
drew from them, not laboriously, but luckily." And, indeed, when one
contemplates a noble creation in art or literature, one seems to receive
from the work itself a certain testimony that it was never wrought out
with wrestling struggle, but was genially and joyfully produced, as the
sun sends forth his beams and the earth her herbage. This appearance
of play and ease is sometimes so notable as to cause a curious
misapprehension. For example, De Quincey permits himself, if my memory
serve me, to say that Plato probably wrote his works not in any
seriousness of spirit, but only as a pastime! A pastime for the
immortals that were.
The reason of this ease may be that perfect performance is ever more the
effluence of a man's nature than the conscious labor of his hands.
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