CHAPTER XV.

OUT OF DOORS WITH NATURE.

OUT of doors! We weary of this unceasing labor—are choking to death of the stagnant air of heaped up cities, which, with their gutter-defiled trigonometries, set at defiance, of assoilation, the straight currents of Heaven's fresh airleaving us to moan and swelter amidst pestilential stagnations!

Let us go, O ye who yearn for purer odors than the steam of the kitchen! Let us go forth-out of doors with Nature! Aye! and when her fresh breath shall come upon our seamed and heated brows, it shall be with an alchemy more strange than the Elixir of vain Cagliostro-more marvellous than all Spells, Philosophers' Stones, and Fortunatus' Caps-more potent than the wizard edicts of that eldest brother of shadowy science-hoar Astrology!

To be sure we ought all of us to be astrologists-perhaps minus the science; for should we not feel humbly-that, as we are children of the earth, so we may be moved as she is moved, in that of us which is earthy?-and that, as the stars are God's flowers of thought-so are those meek wild flowers which we find upon her bosom, the starry bloomings of the thought of earth! Should we not learn, too, to read their teachings?—perhaps thus the blossoming of Life may be renewed in us.

Be this as it may-these flowers, and trees, and birds-we love them best and dearly "out of doors!"

We know that these Stars may speak drear things to us,