Explore "The Daffodil" by Alice Meynell on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
To travel eastwards and breast the sun, to sail towards the watershed and breast the floods, to go north and breast the winter -- fresh and warm are the energies of such bracing action; but more animating still is it to live so as to breast the stress of time.
Man and woman may, like the child, or almost like him, fill the time and enlarge the capacity of the day -- our poor day that so easily shrinks and dwindles in the careless possession of idle minds. The date, every first of March, for example, may sweep upon a large curve and come home annually after a swinging flight. To the infinite variety of natural days may be entrusted half the work of strengthening the flight against time, but the other half must be the task of the vehement heart. Nature assuredly does not fail. Days, seasons, and years are as wide asunder as the unforeseen can set them, and a crowd of children is not more various. But the resisting heart seems of late to be somewhat lacking. We are inclined to turn our heel upon the East, upon the watershed, upon the gates of the wind, and to go the smooth road.