Follow the path to happiness ~ Poetic Nature Theme

Follow the path to your dreams, you only have to find the right way to go! Seek and thee shall find i'm sure ~ In this photograph the only pathway option leads to an incredibly beautiful sunset 🌅 If only real life was that simple 😀

Image Source: Pixabay.com ~ CC0 Creative Commons ~ Website LINK

"The Country Life" A poem by the Author: Richard Henry Stoddard

Not what we would, but what we must,
Makes up the sum of living:
Heaven is both more and less than just,
In taking and in giving.
Swords cleave to hands that sought the plow,
And laurels miss the soldier's brow.

Me, whom the city holds, whose feet
Have worn its stony highways,
Familiar with its loneliest street,—
Its ways were never my ways.
My cradle was beside the sea,
And there, I hope, my grave will be.

Old homestead! in that old gray town
Thy vane is seaward blowing;
Thy slip of garden stretches down
To where the tide is flowing;
Below they lie, their sails all furled,
The ships that go about the world.

Dearer that little country house,
Inland with pines beside it;
Some peach trees, with unfruitful boughs,
A well, with weeds to hide it:
No flowers, or only such as rise
Self-sown—poor things!—which all despise.

Dear country home! can I forget
The least of thy sweet trifles?
The window vines that clamber yet,
Whose blooms the bee still rifles?
The roadside blackberries, growing ripe,
And in the woods the Indian pipe?

Happy the man who tills his field,
Content with rustic labor;
Earth does to him her fullness yield,
Hap what may to his neighbor.
Well days, sound nights—oh, can there be
A life more rational and free?

Such a sentimental poem really, but it must be so wonderful to live in the country with all that natural beauty around you to explore and enjoy, whilst just thinking about life to yourself!

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