Rise with the sun, if you would keep the commandments. The sleep
you get before midnight goes to virtue; after sunrise, to vice. "It
is wise," says Aristotle, "to be up before daybreak, for such habit
contributes to health, wealth, and wisdom." If this virtue, commended
alike by antiquity and by our sense of self-respect, has fallen into
discredit in modern times, it was practised by our forefathers and bore
its fruits. They
"With much shorter and far sweeter sleep content,
Vigorous and fresh about their labors went."
"He that in the morning hath heard the voice of virtue," says
Confucius, "may die at night." And it were virtuous to rise early
during our June mornings to breakfast on strawberries with the robins,
or what were as good, partake of Leigh Hunt's delicious Essay on these
berries. One tastes them from his potted pages. And his very quotations
are palatable.
"My Lord of Ely, when I was last in Holburn,
I saw good strawberries in your garden there;
I pray you send for some of them."
An ancient may read "Concord" instead of "my Lord of Ely's" gardens,
and enjoy the sight moreover of his grandson's vermilioned fingers
while picking them; the berries in no wise inferior to his Lordship's
in flavor or color, and far larger in size,--that Yankee superstition.
But one tastes none like the wild ones plucked fresh from the meadows
of his native place, while the dews sparkled in the grasses, and the
bobolink sought to decoy him from her nest there when he approached it.
The lay lingers in the ear still:--
"A single note, so sweet and low,
Like a full heart's overflow,
Forms the prelude,--but the strain
Gives us no sweet tone again;
For the wild and saucy song
Leaps and skips the notes among
With such quick and sportive play,
Ne'er was merrier, madder lay."