iSi 



VIII. 



SONGS WITHOUT WORDS. 



I AM spending a lazy holiday at the edge of a wood, and find life 

 under a summer sky and in a summer temperature endurable, but 

 nothing more. I recline on a mossy bank, and if not exactly sub 

 tegminefagi for the tree overhead is a sturdy oak I can yet appre- 

 ciate the coolness of the shadow cast by the foliage above. A clear 

 space in front, allows the eye to wander at will over meadow-land and 

 corn-field. Some idle cows, animated by like impulses to those 

 which impel humanity, are congregated beneath the beeches in an 

 adjoining meadow, and sweep with their tails the humming congrega- 

 tion of flies bent on annoying bovine existence, which placidly 

 ruminates, insects notwithstanding. The humming of the flies forms 

 well-nigh the only sound one can hear on this stillest of days, but 

 now and then a rook overhead will adjudicate some domestic diffi- 

 culty with a loud "caw," and after a circling flight will once mere sink 

 to rest in the bosom of his family. Now and then a sleepy chirp 

 reminds one of bird-existence above, but the laziness of living nature 

 on a warm summer day is, to say the least of it, remarkable. In 

 the thicket and apple-orchard beyond, I could find busy life in all its 

 forms. I could show you my coleopterous friends the burying-beetles, 

 hard at work interring the mouse that has come somehow or other to 

 an untimely end ; and to watch them toiling in their cuirassed jackets 

 is a procedure exciting our sympathy much in the same way as you 

 pity a fatigue-party of soldiers doing duty on a sweltering day. 

 Bees, wasps, and flies, on their mission of pollen-distribution and 

 flower-fertilisation, are busy enough in their turn : but the heat is 

 cogent argument against work, and, like the cows, one may profitably 

 rest and ruminate. 



To-day one's thoughts glance off at a tangent, excited by no very 

 poetical stimulus perhaps, but by an incident which, however com- 

 monplace it may seem, nevertheless leads to the domain of the 

 natural, and, I will add, is somewhat within the vein of poesie also. 

 My stimulus has been the cawing of rooks, the humming of flies and 

 bees, and the chirping of a grasshopper also lazily inclined, if I may 

 judge from the quiet and self-possessed manner in which it progresses 

 between the grass-blades close by. From the hearing of such sounds, 

 one's thoughts insensibly merge towards the diffusion of voice in lower 

 life at large. The faint tinkle of a piano reaches my ear through the 



