The Granite Monthly; A Magazine of Literature, History and State Progress Volume 51 (Paperback)

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1919 edition. Excerpt: ...to crack. The long grass is falling before the scythes of the mowers or before the keen blade of the merrily singing machines, and the friendly breezes bring me whiffs of the sweet-smelling fresh-cut hay. I have broken all fetters, my soul is free, and I am as happy and complacent as God himself as I look upon the great, green world in its beauty. Some men think that fame, money, travel, etc., are needed in order to be happy, but I know better. How much wiser was The Sweet Sanity Of Jefferies In his "Pageant of Summer," where he shows us "It is quite enuf to lie in the shadow of green boughs and listen to the songs of summer, drink in the sunlight, the aix, flowers, the sky, the beauty of all." Thoreau, Whitman, Jefferies, Burroughs are the men who in modern times have known, above all others, the worth of all this; but back farther St. Francis, Jesus, Theocritus knew it full well. The Sweetness Of The July Night Follows the July day--the warm, balmy night in the woods, when all is dark, the noises of the day hushed in the glorious sunset. And this night brings its own peculiar sweetness in the shape of a different set of odors, sounds, and thrills. The joys of the July day are thus twenty-four hours long, and to the appreciative heart that touches a July day at any point of time there is a feeling of ecstasy. And so I am lying here, drunken with the joys of a July day in a New Hampshire bit of pine woodland. The world is ablaze with the life of the big July sun, everything quivers, thrills, with joy. At other times Nature makes us feel complacent and happy in a restful sort of way, but today she makes us hilarious in our joy--one catches the spirit of the birds that flit about the pines, and his happy heart cannot...