the passion, the pain, the unutterable delight of the heavenly jargoning when the whole of the little choir begin their magnificent rivalry!  The thought of death is gone, the wild and poignant issues of life are softened, and the pulses beat thickly amid the blinding sweetness of the music.  He who has not heard the nightingale has not lived.  Far off the sea called low through the mist, and the long path of the moon ran toward the bright horizon; the ships stole in shadow and shine over the glossy ripples, and swung away to north and south till they faded in wreaths of delicate darkness.  Dominating the whole scene of beauty, there was the vast and subtle mystery of the heath that awed the soul even when the rapture was at its keenest.  Time passed away, and on one savage night I read Thomas Hardy’s unparalleled description of the majestic waste in “The Return of the Native.”  That superb piece of English is above praise—­indeed praise, as applied to it, is half an impertinence; it is great as Shakespeare, great almost as Nature—­one of the finest poems in our language.  As I read with awe the quiet inevitable sentences, the vision of my own heath rose, and the memory filled me with a sudden joy.

I know that the hour of darkness ever dogs our delight, and the shadow of approaching darkness and toil might affront me even now, if I were ungrateful; but I live for the present only.  Let grave persons talk about the grand achievements and discoveries that have made this age or that age illustrious; I hold that holidays are the noblest invention of the human mind, and, if any philosopher wants to argue the matter, I flee from his presence, and luxuriate on the yellow sands or amid the keen kisses of the salty waves.  I own that Newton’s discoveries were meritorious, and I willingly applaud Mr. George Stephenson, through whose ingenuity we are now whisked to our places of rest with the swiftness of an eagle’s flight.  Nevertheless I contend that holidays are the crowning device of modern thought, and I hold that no thesis can be so easily proven as mine.  How did our grandfathers take holiday?  Alas, the luxury was reserved for the great lords who scoured over the Continent, and for the pursy cits who crawled down to Brighthelmstone!  The ordinary Londoner was obliged to endure agonies on board a stuffy Margate hoy, while the people in Northern towns never thought of taking a holiday at all.  The marvellous cures wrought by Doctor Ozone were not then known, and the science of holiday-making was in its infancy.  The wisdom of our ancestors was decidedly at fault in this matter, and the gout and dyspepsia from which they suffered served them right.  Read volumes of old memoirs, and you will find that our forefathers, who are supposed to have been so merry and healthy, suffered from all the ills which grumblers ascribe to struggling civilization.  They did not know how to extract pleasure from their midsummer days and midsummer nights; we do, and we are all the better for the grand modern discovery.