It was a fine summer's day—an English summer's day, not oppressively hot—when it is a delight to breathe the warm pleasant air, doubly pleasant if it comes loaded with the fragrance of new-mown hay, or the perfume of some neighbouring hawthorn blossom, as it came to me through my open cottage window. “Well,” said I, in answer to the inviting breeze, “I will go out, and leave off pondering on that dark entangled web, human life; and, with beautiful joyous nature around me, forget man's troubled existence.” I raised my head from its drooping position, closed my books, locked my desk, and sallied out. But, like my own shadow, thoughts of sadness followed me into the bright sunshine of my garden, and I could not escape from the latter any more than from the former. The birds warbled in vain to me, the flowers I loved so well sent me consoling words in their language of sweet odours: but they spoke in vain. Man's destiny appeared to me only the more wretched by comparison with the fairy scene in which he performs his little part.