There should always be some flowering and maturing of the fruits of nature in the cooking process.  Some simple dishes recommend themselves to our imaginations as well as palates.  In parched corn, for instance, there is a manifest sympathy between the bursting seed and the more perfect developments of vegetable life.  It is a perfect flower with its petals, like the houstonia or anemone.  On my warm hearth these cerealian blossoms expanded; here is the bank whereon they grew.  Perhaps some such visible blessing would always attend the simple and wholesome repast.

Here was that “pleasant harbor” which we had sighed for, where the weary voyageur could read the journal of some other sailor, whose bark had ploughed, perchance, more famous and classic seas.  At the tables of the gods, after feasting follow music and song; we will recline now under these island trees, and for our minstrel call on

ANACREON.

“Nor has he ceased his charming song, for still that lyre,
Though he is dead, sleeps not in Hades.”
Simonides’ Epigram on Anacreon.

I lately met with an old volume from a London bookshop, containing the Greek Minor Poets, and it was a pleasure to read once more only the words, Orpheus, Linus, Musaeus,—­those faint poetic sounds and echoes of a name, dying away on the ears of us modern men; and those hardly more substantial sounds, Mimnermus, Ibycus, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Menander.  They lived not in vain.  We can converse with these bodiless fames without reserve or personality.

I know of no studies so composing as those of the classical scholar.  When we have sat down to them, life seems as still and serene as if it were very far off, and I believe it is not habitually seen from any common platform so truly and unexaggerated as in the light of literature.  In serene hours we contemplate the tour of the Greek and Latin authors with more pleasure than the traveller does the fairest scenery of Greece or Italy.  Where shall we find a more refined society?  That highway down from Homer and Hesiod to Horace and Juvenal is more attractive than the Appian.  Reading the classics, or conversing with those old Greeks and Latins in their surviving works, is like walking amid the stars and constellations, a high and by way serene to travel.  Indeed, the true scholar will be not a little of an astronomer in his habits.  Distracting cares will not be allowed to obstruct the field of his vision, for the higher regions of literature, like astronomy, are above storm and darkness.

But passing by these rumors of bards, let us pause for a moment at the Teian poet.